University of Houston
Department of Computer Science
In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science

RADHA KARTALA
will defend her thesis

PERFORMANCE TESTING TOOL FOR .NET

Abstract

NUnit is a unit testing framework that can be used with all the .NET languages like C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++. It was written in C# based on the JUnit testing framework for Java. While JUnit mainly involved testing the functionality of the code, an extension of JUnit, called JUnitPerf developed by Mike Clark, introduced performance testing to Java developers. While functionality testing leads to the production of error-free software, performance testing leads to the development of quality software. The motivation of this thesis was to bring a similar extension of a performance testing tool to .NET developers.

The objective of this thesis is to extend NUnit to incorporate performance testing. We tried to base our tool on JUnitPerf which was inheritance based. It was very convenient to extend JUnit. But NUnit is attribute-based and NUnit 2.2, which is the current final release, does not provide any mechanism for extensibility. An iteration release called NUnit 2.2.1 provides an extensibility mechanism that we used to extend NUnit classes and introduce new behavior. Consequently we created TimedTest and LoadTest attributes as an extension to NUnit. Our performance testing tool is conceptually based on JUnitPerf and has the same attributes, TimedTest and LoadTest, that JUnitPerf provides as JUnit test decorators.