About the Name

Our name comes from the phrase "Test-Centric Development," a term I use when working with software teams. It describes an approach where pretty much everything a team does has a test of some kind behind it, ranging from micro-tests of the software to more subjective "tests" that help us decide what engineering practices work best for us.

In addition to working with teams and conducting training, the TestCentric group is focused on developing tools and techniques that support that approach to software development. Currently, all the TestCentric tools are Open Source, although there may be commercial versions of some of them in the future.

About Me

I'm Charlie Poole and I've worked in software development since the 1970s. In 2001 I came across Extreme Programming and in particular Test-Driven Development. I was involved in the NUnit project from 2002 to 2021.

I left NUnit in order to pursue some new directions in software tooling and TestCentric is the vehicle for that. Of course, much of the TestCentric tooling leverages work done by me and others on the NUnit team.

Software

TestCentric GUI Runner

NUnit V2 came with a GUI runner in addition to the console runner. Beginning with NUnit 3, no GUI runner was provided. The TestCentric Runner was created to fill that gap.

All our development work is now focused on Version 2 of the runner. The latest release is 2.0.0-beta2. Documentation is available here

Version 1 of the TestCentric GUI is considered legacy but is still availble. It looks and works very much like the NUnit V2 GUI. Of course, it support NUnit 3 tests and - using the standard NUnit extension - NUnit V2 tests as well. The final version of that runner was 1.6.2. Documentation here.

TC-Lite Test Framework

TC-Lite is a lightweight test framework in the spirit of NUnitLite, aimed at the creation and execution of fast, independent micro-tests. Tests are self-executing, being incorporated in an executable assembly, and require no additional infrastructure beyond the framework itself.

Work on TC-Lite is ongoing. Documentation for what has been implemented so far is available here.