Steps to take to slowly integrate unit-testing into a project

Question

I\'m currently on a co-op term working on a project nearing completion with one other co-op student. Since this project has been passed down from co-op to co-op, poor practices

Answer 1

How about writing a series of black-box tests around major pieces of functionality in your code? Since you mention that it's an ASP.NET project, you can use a framework such as WaitN or Selenium to automate a web browser. This gives you a baseline set of functionality that should remain constant no matter how much the code changes.

Once you have a comfortable number of tests testing the high-level functionality of your project, I'd then start diving into the code, and as Simon P. Stevens mentions, work slowly. Grab a (free!) copy of Refactor! for Visual Basic, so you'll be able to automatically perform some basic refactoring, such as Extract Method. You can drastically increase testability without changing any functionality just by splitting up larger chunks of code into smaller, more testable chunks.