Painful development cycle – rebuild and run unit tests in 4 minutes

This Christmas I’m going try out improving the development environment at my current project. The baseline is as follows.

The project is big and has been running for years. Previously they have been working on the parts of the systems that the customers use through a web solutions, and the parts that the customer-facing employees use.

The part I am working on now was started fairly recently, and consists of the core system, which mainly run in the background using batch jobs, and providing services for the other parts of the system. This is what I will be talking about here.

We have three solutions. One for the services, one for the web front end (for administration of the system), and one for the batch jobs. The web front end and the batch jobs use the services extensively, mainly using the DLLs directly.

There are many problems:

• The services solution has 58 projects and takes 90-100 seconds to rebuild on my machine (8 GB RAM running on SSD)
• Running 473 unit tests takes 2 minutes 20-40 seconds
• Running the complete test suite of 585 unit and integration test take around 5 minutes
• When changing some code in one file, and some code in a corresponding test file, and then running the unit tests in one test class, this takes 20-25 seconds!

The architecture paradigm the whole project is based on is Service Oriented Architecture. Most of the code is written using Transaction Scripts as the way of organizing code. The services solution is divided into 9 services, each containing at least 6 projects.

(The project names are fake in the illustrations)

• DAL: Data Access Layer, containing the code that accesses the database (using 1-to-1 modeled Entity Framework)
• BC: Business Components, the implementation of the functionality.
• ServiceContracts: XML-first defined contracts of the services that are provided.
• Services: Web projects hosting WCF-services (.svc-files)
• ServiceImplementations: Contains the code-behind for the WCF-services
• Tests: Unit and integrations tests, mainly for BC and DAL.

The services are connected (or coupled). They call services in up to four other services.  Some of services contains an extra projects, which exist to avoid circular references.

So, this is what I hopefully will be able to improve by restructuring the solution and projects.

Tomorrow I will start by removing unnecessary projects, and see how that affects the build and test run times.