Make member public to unit-test it

Question

I know there are many question concerning unit-tests of private members within classes. Most of them come to the conclusion that having private members that need to be tested are a design-flaw that needs refactoring (eg see here ). However I still have one last question:

When I refactor my private members to new classes they become (public) API-members however which I intended to avoid. So by simplifying our client class we polute our API by designing a new publicly visibly helper-class. Of course one might also write the test-code within the assembly and make those helpers internal but thus we´d also ship test-code to production-site.

I assume there is no right answer to this issue but perhaps you have some great ideas that help to avoid those situations?

Answer 1

Regarding C# there is one last trick you could try

1. Make your class /members internal
2. In the assembly to test, open the AssemblyInfo.cs file and make the internals visible to your Test-Project/Assembly by adding the following attribute:

[InternalsVisibleTo("YourTestProject")]

This makes you members invisible outside your assembly, except for the sake of test within the "YourTestProject"-Assembly.

More info on this Attribute can be found on MSDN .

Answer 2

I planned to write this as an edit but I come to the conclusion that I made whrong assumptions on the questions. I think my problem is that I mix WHAT to test with HOW to test it.

WHAT to test: members that do a certain amount of work that is worth to be tested. Access-modifier does not play any role here .

HOW to test: no problem on public members; however on private members a bit tricky, but doable as seen on nozzlemans answer above.

Having said this the correct approach would be to extract the relevant members to new non-public helper-classes . To be able to test those members although not public we use any of the previosly mentioned approaches, reflection, InternalsVisibleTo or even private accessors (which use reflection at some point).