Gil at Typemock has been posting about some ideas we discussed over breakfast at the Typemock Partner conference a while ago, I have been a bit slow at commenting, so I though I better add to the conversation. Though Typemock is an excellent mocking framework, for me basic mocking is not its biggest win. All the ‘classic auto mocking’ of interfaces to speed TDD style working is great, but I can do that with any of the .NET mocking frameworks. All they do is mean I don’t have to write my own test stubs and mocks, so saving me time, which is good but not the keep win I was looking for.
For me there is another way to save much more time and that is to reduce my ‘build, deploy, use’ cycle. In the land of SharePoint this is a significant time saving, or at least has been for us. It has meant that I can replace the build, create WSP, deploy WSP, let SharePoint/IIS restart and then view a web part, with a build and view in ASP.NET page that uses Typemock to fake out all to SharePoint calls. This is what Gil has termed Isolation Driven Development (IDD) Now isn’t a three letter _DD name going a bit far, I am even not sure there enough in it for me to write a book!
That said this is a solid technique which can be applied to any complex environment where developers or testers need a means to mock out significant, costly, or just slow components to ease there daily work process, often enabling some manual testing process, thus making them more productive. If you read the TPS books it mentions a lot how workers should optimise their work space to reduce wasted time the spend moving between machines or roles, this is just such a move.
So if you want to use the technique for Sharepoint have a look at my post, I hope it will save you time whether on SP2007 or 2010, or maybe apply same technique to other technologies.