by Damian
6. March 2012 14:05
So I started a little online campaign yesterday to get the JetBrains folks to natively support xUnit in ReSharper. It already supports NUnit and MSTest (ugh) so what are the business cases for supporting xUnit?
- xUnit was part created by the same guy who was also involed in crating NUnit, Jame NewKirk. He details his leasons learned here, and thus can be argued that xUnit is a more modern version of NUnit.
- On NuGet gallery, NUnit has ~75K downloads compared to xUnit's ~14K, about 19% of NUnit's total. Not an insignificant market share.
- xUnit stats show a slow, but steady increase in adoption rates.
- xUnit-contrib, a projects whose predominate purpose is to provide a plugin for the ReSharper runner, also shows steady adoption. This project always lags behind the ReSharper releases and completely unusable during EAP phases due to API churn.
- xUnit, current version being 1.9, has had a version independent runner since 1.6. Thus ReSharper and the developer won't be constrained to any particular xUnit version, as long as it's > 1.6.
I hypothsized that xUnit adoption is being held back because ReSharper doesn't natively support it. That is, people are using it because using something else is simply too much friction. JetBrains ran a (non-scientific) poll to see of the NUnit/MSTest user base, who would move to another unit test framework if the friction is removed. As of posting, this is the current result:
The interesting thing is that over 54% of respondents would make a move if there was no friction. And at 39%, I am concluding from that that native xUnit support is a desired feature by ReSharper's customers. I hope JetBrains arrive at the same conclusion.
To vote on the offical issue, do so here http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/RSRP-205721
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