Unit testing a timer based application?

Question

I am currently writing a simple, timer based mini app in C# that performs an action n times every k seconds.
I am trying to adopt a test driven development style, so my

Answer 1

I agree with Danny insofar as it probably makes sense from a unit-testing perspective to simply forget about the timer mechanism and just verify that the action itself works as expected. I would also say that I disagree in that it's wasted effort to include the configuration of the timer in an automated test suite of some kind. There are a lot of edge cases when it comes to working with timing applications and it's very easy to create a false sense of security by only testing the things that are easy to test.

I would recommend having a suite of tests that runs the timer as well as the real action. This suite will probably take a while to run and would likely not be something you would run all the time on your local machine. But setting these types of things up on a nightly automated build can really help root out bugs before they become too hard to find and fix.

So in short my answer to your question is don't worry about writing a few tests that do take a long time to run. Unit test what you can and make that test suite run fast and often but make sure to supplement that with integration tests that run less frequently but cover more of the application and its configuration.