Pluggable Agents

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Charlie Poole

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Mar 31, 2021, 9:07:45 PM3/31/21

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Chris Maddock coined the term "pluggable agent" for a test execution agent, similar to nunit-agent.exe, which could be distributed as an extension to NUnit. Such a thing would mean that NUnit itself doesn't have to maintain agents of every possible type, but that they may be added to the installation.

Working in the TestCentric GUI fork of the engine, I have implemented the idea and have now created the first such agent. This one allows running tests under .NET Framework 2.0, whose built-in agent has been removed from the engine itself. I'll follow up with one for .NET Standard 1.6, which I also plan to remove.

My guess is that this feature will first be available in the 2.0 Release of the GUI, followed in NUnit itself when 4.0 is released. Initially, I imagine it will be used for legacy and niche platforms, but the feature eventually permit other usage, such as easier debugging in the test process and possibly even running within the same process.

The current implementation, which aims at tests to be run in a separate process, consists of a new type of extension (IAgentLauncher) together with an executable, which it launches.

I'll announce packages when they are available. For now, you can check out the code at https://github.com/TestCentric/net20-pluggable-agent