I ran across this concept in an internal discussion group a while back and thought it would be worth sharing. Arlo Belshee is the coiner of the phrase as far as I know. The idea is simply that you come up with a threshold of time that you find acceptable for your tests to run in. One which allows you to still maintain a TDD workflow. Below is Arlo’s recommended test budget.
Test Budget
- Up to 3 tests that take longer than 2 seconds.
- Up to 100 tests that take longer than .02 seconds.
- Infinite tests that take less than .02 seconds.
I also think that you should have a ratio of the three, #1 should not comprise more than 1% of your tests and #2 should not be more than 10% of your tests. The idea is that as you’re writing unit tests you need to design your code in such a way so that it is easily testable in order to meet your test budgets. If you’re writing slow tests early you end up hitting a wall and the friction caused by the tests degrades the value proposition of TDD.
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