Acceptance Testing .NET Applications using IronPython

By Michael Foord -
This article, written by Jonathan Hartley, was originally published in the Python Magazine.


Unit tests demonstrate to developers that individual functions and classes work as expected. Acceptance tests are an orthogonal complement to this. They verify to everybody, including managers and clients, that features they understand and care about are completed and working correctly. They also prove that the system as a whole is correctly integrated and that no regressions have occurred. Resolver Systems is developing a .NET desktop spreadsheet application, Resolver One, for which we have accumulated an acceptance testing framework. This framework uses Python’s standard unittest module, and is executed using IronPython. While Resolver One is written in IronPython, this technique allows IronPython tests to interact with product code written in any .NET language. This article describes the principles of this IronPython acceptance testing framework, and demonstrates them by creating an acceptance test for a small sample C# GUI application.

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