Test Driven Development is an essential part of any software project. Leveraging Flex Unit in your Flex and AIR projects is a well known best practice and will inevitably result in less unknowns and provide a much more reliable codebase, however like most things in life that provide value, unit testing comes at a cost: Time.

In general, writing Unit tests is often an overlooked process as it ultimately equates to an additional level of effort (time) in a project plan. However, writing unit tests should not be over looked for a number of reasons, and in my opinion most importantly because it forces developers to understand what problems the code they write are intended to solve, thus resulting in a better understanding of the problem domain.

Now without getting into a lengthy discussion about the benefits of Test Driven Development, as there is plenty of information available on the subject, I am going to focus on how to make it easier in Flex.

Typically when I write a unit test I stub it out and then run the test runner to make sure it fails. I pretty much do this immediately after I write the test and then I see that my test did not come up and realize I never added it to the test suite. Obviously something like adding tests to a test suite can be an automated process which would allow unit tests to be developed a little faster as all that would be needed was to write the test.

So in an effort to simplify the process of adding tests to a test suite I have developed a TestSuiteHelper which is a simple utility class that automates the process of adding unit tests to a test suite. Rather than manually adding each test the TestSuiteHelper will automate the process simply by invoking a static method and passing in the test class from which you need to extract all of the tests.

So if you would like to simplify your team’s unit testing workflow feel free to utilize the TestSuiteHelper.