Performance Testing Versus Unit Testing
performance, unit-testing
Solution
I agree with your findings/learnings. True unit tests only test a portion of the system, ignoring, mocking or faking the rest as necessary. Integration tests (or regression tests) test most or all of the units working together, and that is the true measure of performance.
Problem
I'm reading Osherove's "The Art of Unit Testing," and though I've not yet seen him say anything about performance testing, two thoughts still cross my mind: - Performance tests generally can't be unit tests, because performance tests generally need to run for long periods of time. - Performance tests generally can't be unit tests, because performance issues too often manifest at an integration or system level (or at least the logic of a single unit test needed to re-create the performance of the integration environment would be too involved to be a unit test). Particularly for the first reason stated above, I doubt it makes sense for performance tests to be handled by a unit testing framework (such as NUnit). My question is: do my findings / leanings correspond with the thoughts of the community?