XUnit - Make your tests more readible

One of the neat tricks that you can do in XUnit is to make your test more readible.

Here is one of my unit tests:

And here is how this looks by default in the Test Explorer:

Adding a configuration file

Let’s now add a configuration file to improve the default behavior.

• Add a new JSON file to the root of your test project. Name the file xunit.runner.json.

• Add a schema reference to get autocomplete behavior while editing the file:

• Remark: In case of Visual Studio, this is not really necessary as it will recognize the file name and apply the correct schema automatically. 

• Tell the build system to copy the file into the build output directory. Edit your .csproj file and add the following:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Content Include="xunit.runner.json" CopyToOutputDirectory="PreserveNewest" />
  </ItemGroup>

Update the configuration

Let’s now tweak the behavior by changing some settings in the configuration file:

This will make our test list already more readable:

Remark: If you don’t see anything happening, check that you have the latest version of XUnit and XUnit.Runner.VisualStudio installed.

I invite you to check out the documentation for some other options you can tweak: https://xunit.net/docs/configuration-files