I use an AHK script from here that I probably originally found on Dave Tchepak's blog, so I just hit CTRL-Shift-U to toggle naming mode, which_I_can_do_ANYWHERE but it can catch me out sometimes ;-)

Camel and pascal casing only really works up to ab...

2011-11-11T12:34:23.929+11:00

Camel and pascal casing only really works up to about 30 characters or so. After that your brain has to work too hard to parse the text, which is why underscores for test names are generally a better approach. Also, when you look at a long list of tests after a test run then it's very easy to read the test names.

Hmm interesting. We tend to stay away from unders...

2011-11-11T10:07:07.532+11:00

Hmm interesting. We tend to stay away from underscores. The main reason is if an editor or something ever underlines it then you can have trouble telling where the underscores are and where just normal spaces are.

You might also try (depending on what you prefer of course) using CamelCase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase).

An example is...

myGreatUnitTestName.

It actually still is very readable. :)

It also depends on your coding standards and language. It is great to sit down and write a coding standard so that everyone is on the same page to start with. That way when some code comes up for review and it doesn't fit the standard you can ask your engineer to refactor it to suit. The end result is code that is consistent and doesn't make people jump through mental hoops every 2 seconds trying to understand the code.

Our practice is to always imagine we are writing code that a completely new employee (armed with our coding standards) might need to sit down and work on it tomorrow. Or another exercise is to imagine that you may not look at or think about the project for 2 or 3 years. That is a good length of time and you would be surprised what you can forget in that time.

What ever you do if you don't code with consistent, readable and well documented code you may never be able to extract yourself from the process and will have to keep working on code that only you can read and understand.

Comments on Richard Banks - Agile and .NET: Underscores in Test Names are a Pain to Type, Righ...

I use an AHK script from here that I probably originally found on Dave Tchepak's blog, so I just hit CTRL-Shift-U to toggle naming mode, which_I_can_do_ANYWHERE but it can catch me out sometimes ;-)

Camel and pascal casing only really works up to ab...

Hmm interesting. We tend to stay away from unders...