Is NUnit a viable choice for a starting long term project these days?

Question

I currently participate on the decision to pick a unit testing framework for a bigger long term project. NUnit, being an ubiquitous unit testing tool, would make it a natural choice for me, but not so long ago I did read some unit testing text shortly mentioning that "NUnit is a dead project". The wording was not exactly like this but this was the impression it gave me and now this is bugging me.

I can't remember where did I read this to check what it was saying exactly or if it had some credit. On NUnit web site I still see beta releases coming out, but I can't get rid of this unsure feeling now.

So, is NUnit a viable choice for a starting long term project these days?

Answer 1

Is NUnit a viable choice for a starting long term project these days?

Yes because it is open source and even if there is no more further development for it you can use it and recomile it for a newer runtime.

You can compare the maintanace situation with the log4net project that had very few updates in the last 5 years but is still the state of the art.

Answer 2

Yes.

I’ve also used to think that NUnit is an old tool and tried to find more “modern” tool for unit tests. But I have found out that NUnit is that modern tool. In compare to MSTest, NUnit is more extended with testing features. NUnit provides better assert error logging. For instance, when you are using CollectionAssert.Contains from MSTest it will throw error “CollectionAssert.Contains failed.” And that’s all. In case of this assert error, NUnit prints the entire collection contents and the element that was not found. Such good error messages save a lot of time during the failure investigation.

And you always can use TestDriven.NET or/and Resharper for better integration between Visual Studio and NUnit