Dear God not Object Mother: An exploration of good ways to generate test fixture data...

Presentation that outlines some ideas I have about better ways of generating fixture data for testing (unit, integration or to insert int oa database for manual testing).

This presentation was first delivered to the Perth .NET User Group on July 4th 2013.

• The theory behind the content presented here is explained in my blog post
• The library I used in this example is one I created; NTestDataBuilder
• This is deliberately a fairly contrived example
• There are some things in here that aren't practical in a production codebase and some things I wouldn't normally do
• I've tried to get a balance between simplifying things to a point they are easily understandable at a glance, but complex enough that they give a good representation of what can happen in a representative codebase - if you have any suggestions of any improvements I can make please raise an issue
• I haven't covered everything that I normally would with tests; in this case I have unit tested the Contains method in the Demographic class and "integration" tested the GetProductsForMember query (usually I would do this against the actual database, but in this case it's just an in-memory collection to reduce the noise of the codebase)
• Yes, the "ISession" is mimicing NHibernate (the ORM I generally find myself using)
• No, the domain entities aren't "NHibernate-ready" - they don't have an id or virtual properties/methods