Question

I’m new to unit testing using nunit (and Java development in general). When creating unit tests for private methods on classes, it looks as though the test file must be in the same package as the class being tested. What is the typical way of avoiding exporting the APIs of the unit tests? Can I make the classes/test methods package-protected? Or do developers typically have a separate build for release that excludes unit test files?

Answer 1

The test file does not necessarily have to be in the same package as the class being tested. In fact, it is a good practice to have the test files in a completely separate package, allowing them to test the public API without being concerned with package-level implementation details.

Alternately, you can set up your build script (e.g. Nant) to ignore files containing ‘Test’ when you build your release executable.