25 minutes is ridiculously long. The old XP rule was 10 minutes and that was with 90s hardware. I start to get annoyed when it takes more than a few seconds.
Likely the problem is too many of the wrong kinds of tests. What you want are what our friend Mike Hill calls microtests--small tests that exercise one behavior of one interface in isolation. What you don't want is things that emulate users poking at a real UI. Anything in between is diminishing returns. A couple integration tests will give you some confidence. A bunch of them will get so annoying that you stop paying attention ("just run it again...")
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Hello,
To those who have experienced test suites that run long, say ~25 minutes, what are some techniques you have used to mitigate it?? We still would like to be able to check in often and run the test suites prior to checking our code in to our repository but these long running tests makes us stretch what we mean with "often".
Joen
