F#: Automated Testing for Developers

Explore techniques for automated software testing in F#. Learn how to improve your test run experience with Ncrunch, work with Unquote to clarify test failures, and more.

Automated testing is a popular topic in software development, but it's still often seen by developers as overhead rather than as an opportunity. By leveraging F# and some external tools and libraries, you can make automated testing easy, enjoyable, and productive. In this course, learn about a variety of techniques for writing automated testing code in F#.
Kit Eason explains how to use xUnit—a .NET unit-testing package—to do some test-driven development, and demonstrates how to improve your test run experience using NCrunch, a test runner. He shows how to use FsCheck to generate test cases, and how to use Expecto to move into the world of tests as first-class values. He also covers the use of Canopy to automate the testing of web user interfaces, and of mocking to tame dependencies.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Working with the sample code
• Solving issues with early versions of Visual Studio 2017

1. Introducing Automated Testing

• What are automated tests and why do they matter?

2. Classical Unit Testing with F#

• Creating a testable project and installing Paket and xUnit
• Creating your first tests
• Test driving an implementation: Part 1
• Test driving an implementation: Part 2
• Providing functional dependencies to tests
• Exercise: Removing nulls from your implementation
• Exercise solution: Removing nulls from your implementation

3. Improving Your Test Run Experience with NCrunch

• Introducing NCrunch: A marvelous test runner
• Organizing tests in NCrunch
• Exercise: Extending test coverage
• Exercise solution: Extending test coverage

4. Going Beyond Test Cases with FsCheck and Unquote

• Introducing property-based testing with FsCheck
• Applying property-based testing
• Supplying additional values
• Controlling FsCheck test data generation
• Exercise: Writing an FsCheck test using a generator
• Exercise solution: Writing an FsCheck test using a generator
• Using Unquote to clarify test failures

5. Making Tests First Class Using Expecto

• Introducing first-class tests with Expecto
• Writing tests in Expecto
• Writing property-based tests in Expecto
• Exercise: Converting tests to use Expecto
• Exercise solution: Converting tests to use Expecto

6. Using Mocking to Tame Dependencies

• Introducing mocking with Foq

7. User Interface Testing

• Web UI testing with Canopy

Conclusion

• Next steps