Why Pex is not massive

Question

Hi there: I was looking at a few videos, etc and I just cant help but wonder why Pex usage seems to be so low?

Are there any problems that are not obvious, or is it just a licence issue?

Answer 1

It's a very new tool and to work really well you need to use Code Contracts as well. It also catches a lot of issues like possible integer overflows that a lot of developers think they can just ignore. Pex is amazing and will take off eventually but it has a learning curve so it's going to take some time to percolate through the .Net ecosystem.

I've used it on a few new development projects and it has saved me two major bugs (not caught by normal unit tests) that would have taken at least a week to track down and fix normally plus a few smaller issues so I'm a big proponent of Pex. That said it takes a lot of work to get it producing good results on an existing code base of any size so how cost effective it is will need to be determined on a project by project basis.