Hi Folks,

We have a software house developing code for us on a project, .NET Web Service (WCF) and we are also paying for a test harness to be built as a separate billable task on a daily rate. I have just joined the company and am reviewing what we are getting from the software house and wanted to know what you guys in industry thought about it?

Basically what we got was a WinForm that called the w/s that had an input area (Web Service Request) to drop our XML a Submit button along with a response area for the result of the Web Response and that's it... Our internal BA has created all the xml request documents so there was no logic put into the harness around this.

Looking on the Net for a definition of a Test Harness I got this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_harness

It states it should have these 3 below things:

• Automate the testing process.
• Execute test suites of test cases.
• Generate associated test reports.

Clearly we have got none of this apart from a partial "Automate the testing process" via a WinForm.

OK, from my development background I would expect someone to Produce a WinForm as a test harness 5 years ago and really should be using some sort of Tooling around this, I explicitly told the Software House I expected some sort of tooling (NUnit,NBUnit, SOAPIU) so we could create a regression test pack for future use. [Didn’t get it but I asked for this after the requirements were signed off as I wasn’t employed then :)]

Would someone be able to clarify with me if my requirement for this is over realistic, I know if I did this, I would use NUnit and TDD and then reuse the test harness as a regression test pack in future?

I am interested to see what the community thought.

Cheers