“Testing is design”; “Unit tests are documentation”; “Tests are specifications”. These are sought-after rewards of developer testing practices, but simply writing tests or even writing tests before writing production code doesn’t make these wishes come true. When we take up unit testing, we initially tend to do things a certain way. Over time we might adopt test-driven development, mock-objects, and ultimately we might adopt the specification and design practices that lead to the lauded benefits of self-documenting code, design through test, and ultimately to a greater level of agility. This …

NGourd, a BDD framework for C#, is presented by Michael Minutillo (@wolfbyte) at the Australian Virtual Alt.Net meeting, May 11 2009. NGourd is designed heavily influenced by the Cucumber tool from the ruby world. The intention is to create a clean separation between the intent of a specification versus it’s execution. This allows developers to concentrate on the technical details while non-programmers can verify and even author specifications.