What is Pex?
Pex generates test inputs that cover all, or at least many of the corner cases in your .NET code. These test inputs are plugged into parameterized unit test that you write. The result is a small unit test suite, where each unit test calls the parameterized unit test with particular test inputs. There is a great picture on the main Pex page that illustrates this process.
Pex supports other unit test frameworks since the unit tests that Pex generates can be executed by other unit test frameworks without Pex. Pex comes with support for MSTest, the unit test framework of Visual Studio, out of the box. For support for other unit test frameworks, please look at the Pex Extensions project.
Parameterized unit tests have been around for quite some time already, under several names — row tests, data-driven tests, theories, etc.
What is really unique about Pex is that it analyzes your .NET code, instruction by instruction, to understand what your code is doing. Then, in a fully automatic way, Pex computes relevant test inputs that trigger the corner cases of the code. When you write assertions, Pex will try to come up with test inputs that cause an assertion to fail.
Feedback
To ask questions, get help, or just give feedback, please take a look at our mailing lists.
Links
Homepage: http://research.microsoft.com/pex
Download: http://research.microsoft.com/pex/downloads.aspx
Nikolai Tillmann’s Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolait
Peli de Halleux’s Blog: http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/
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