Parallel Execution of Visual Studio Team System Unit Tests

By Doug Holland (Intel) (235 posts) on July 2, 2009 at 4:07 pm

While running some unit tests within Visual Studio 2008 it seemed that it would often be possible to execute the unit tests in parallel on multi-processor or multi-core machines.

Obviously thread safety would be the responsibility of the test authors and the parallel execution of the unit tests could be an optional capability with the default being the sequential execution.

With continuous integration and gated checkin scenarios the parallel execution of unit tests could be very useful. In the near future developer workstations and servers will have considerably more cores than are typically available today and so the performance impact of such parallel execution could be considerable. 

If you agree with this suggestion then click on the following image from the Microsoft Connect and vote on it as the Visual Studio teams really do listen to feature requests.

Categories: Parallel Programming, Software Engineering

Comments (6)

July 3, 2009 9:49 AM PDT


Mr. Hericus		 I agree. Our customers get a tremendous benefit from parallelization in the builds and in the execution of the unit tests. The more cores the better!
July 3, 2009 9:56 AM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)
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 Hey Mr. Hericus,

I'm glad you agree and so the more votes we can get for the suggestion the more chance we've got of getting parallel execution of unit tests into a future release.

Regards,

Doug
July 8, 2009 7:01 PM PDT

Gastón C. Hillar
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 Hey Doug,

I agree. Awesome idea. I've already voted.

Regards,

Gaston
July 10, 2009 10:17 AM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)
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 Hey Gastón,

Thanks for voting dude!!!

You going to PDC this year? I'll send you an e-mail...

- Doug
July 16, 2009 7:27 PM PDT

Gastón C. Hillar
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 Hey Doug,

PDC 2009 is going to be one of the most interesting ones in the last years. :)
VS 2010, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Multicore programming, The Cloud, Azure, Silverlight 3, .Net 4, ASP.Net 4.0. Too many news!!!
July 17, 2009 9:06 AM PDT

Doug Holland (Intel)
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 Totally agree Gastón!!!

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