Enable monitoring of objects during and after test runs

Hi,

first of all I want to say thanks for this great tool! It makes development and testing so much easier!

The feature I would love to see would allow me to decorate some of the objects involved in my tests with a new attribute, so that I can always see their properties during/at the end of a test run.

This request is motivated by this talk: http://vimeo.com/36579366#t=1156 where Bret Victor says that

creators need an immediate connection to what they create

- and I agree with him. At the timestamp in the link he shows a development environment which allows the dev to immediately see what his code does (in his example he develops a binary search algorithm - he has many more examples, which make it even easier to see the benefits). With NCrunch it should be possible to get something similar. We could have a "Monitoring window", which shows all objects which are decorated with an "NCrunchMonitoringAttribute" and their properties during and at the end of a test run.

If NCrunch has a plugin system (I didn't find one), I would be willing to contribute this feature as a plugin.

Best,

Lars

Hi Lars,

Thanks for posting and for sharing this suggestion. I have been considering for some time ways in which NCrunch can capture more information during test runs, as it would be extremely useful to be able to somehow show this information inline in the IDE while you work. It would be yet another thing that would help to draw people away from needing to fire up a debugger in order to inspect the workings of their code.

The challenges around capturing runtime information are always around dealing with vast amounts of data and finding ways of sifting this down to the information that's actually relevant. NCrunch's approach around collecting performance and coverage data has been fairly clear-cut, though it's harder to make this work for properties on an object.

The use of an attribute is a good idea. I'll have a bit more of a think about this and see what other options there may be, and what may be possible. Thanks for taking the time to suggest this.


Cheers,

Remco