title: Integration Testing best practices
body: <p>Our team has hundreds of integration tests that hit a database and verify results. I've got two base classes for all the integration tests, one for retrieve-only tests and one for create/update/delete tests. The retrieve-only base class regenerates the database during the TestFixtureSetup so it only executes once per test class. The CUD base class regenerates the database before each test. Each repository class has its own corresponding test class.</p>
  
  <p>As you can imagine, this whole thing takes quite some time (approaching 7-8 minutes to run and growing quickly). Having this run as part of our CI (CruiseControl.Net) is not a problem, but running locally takes a long time and really prohibits running them before committing code.</p>
  
  <p>My question is are there any best practices to help speed up the execution of these types of integration tests?</p>
  
  <p>I'm unable to execute them in-memory (a la sqlite) because we use some database specific functionality (computed columns, etc.) that aren't supported in sqlite.</p>
  
  <p>Also, the whole team has to be able to execute them, so running them on a local instance of SQL Server Express or something could be error prone unless the connection strings are all the same for those instances.</p>
  
  <p>How are you accomplishing this in your shop and what works well?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>