Question

We are thinking about moving our tests from MSTest to XUnit.

Is there any migration application that takes a MSTest and migrates it to XUnit?

Also, if not, what should I look out for when doing this?

Thanks.
JD.

Answer 1

I moved quite a few tests recently. It depends on how many and what type of tests you’re converting, and you didnt kill yourself giving us details. In general, I think its safe to assume that your average MSTest minded shop wont be massively Test Infected and thus wont have delved into each dark corner of MSTest.

All the Assert.* methods and the basic Test Attributes are simple find and replaces. The more rare ones, I’d generally steer towards assessing each case individually. Unless you’re already a xUnit.net expert, you’ve got lots to learn and this will help you.

Also, usage of Assert.Fail isnt a simple transformation. The other thing is the transformation of TestClassInitialize to IUseFixture – simple to do, but hard to automate.

If people are using Test References, you won’t be able to remove the reference to the MSTest assembly (and you’ll still need to have VS on your build server – and it will continue to randomly fail on the Shadow taks, see my questions).

The biggest manual work for me was going through the 20 lines of boilerplate in a region at the top to see whether anyone actually used any of the custom attributes before deleting them.

The main thing that would have been a lot of work had it not been for a CodeRush template was converting ExpectedException to Assert.Throws. If you havent got CodeRush or ReSharper on this job, you’d be stealing money from your employer.