what's a good technique for building and running many similar unit tests?

Question

I have a test setup where I have many very similar unit tests that I need to run. For example, there are about 40 stored procedures that need to be checked for existence in the target environment. However I'd like all the tests to be grouped by their business unit. So there'd be 40 instances of a very similar TestMethod in 40 separate classes. Kinda lame. One other thing: each group of tests need to be in their own solution. So Business Unit A will have a solution called Tests.BusinessUnitA.

I'm thinking that I can set this all up by passing a configuration object (with the name of the stored proc to check, among other things) to a TestRunner class.

The problem is that I'm losing the atomicity of my unit tests. I wouldn't be able to run just one of the tests, I'd have to run all the tests in the TestRunner class.

This is what the code looks like at this time. Sure, it's nice and compact, but if Test 8 fails, I have no way of running just Test 8.

  TestRunner runner = new TestRunner(config, this.TestContext);

  var runnerType = typeof(TestRunner);
  var methods = runnerType.GetMethods()
     .Where(x => 
       x.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(TestMethodAttribute), false)
       .Count() > 0).ToArray();

      foreach (var method in methods)
      {
       method.Invoke(runner, null);
      }

So I'm looking for suggestions for making a group of unit tests that take in a configuration object but won't require me to generate many many TestMethods. This looks like it might require code-generation, but I'd like to solve it without that.

Answer 1

Can you use Data Driven Tests? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182519(VS.80).aspx

You can then exclude rows that previously passed...

Answer 2

My solution to this was to put all the tests in their own assembly, decorate them with attributes then reflect through the assembly to execute the tests. Made more sense than data driven tests.