The really long and descriptive names are a nice idea though; I’ll be sure to integrate them.

The answer is to separate out the layers of your app in a better way, and start making use of Mocking. You’ll definitely need to do a little refactoring, but you can keep this manageable. For a really great, and detailed, discussion on best practices when refactoring “legacy” code, pick up a copy of Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers.

Now, some advice. I realize that the code you posted is example, throw-away code, but I want to look at that first, because it may shed some light on what you’re trying to accomplish and maybe get you to start thinking about the problem from a different direction.

The name of your test “CreateTest” is meaningless. When you’re looking at your test results and you see “CreateTest failed”, that doesn’t tell you anything. A better name for that test would be “TestThatDefaultWidgetIsCreatedWhenEmptyWidgetNameIsPassedToFactory”.

Unless your factory has a lot of conditional logic in it, there’s not a lot of value in testing said factory. You want to spend more of your time testing the different widget objects. If I had a look at your test, I have a feeling I’d see some higher level tests in there along side of that factory test. You’re probably testing at too high of a level. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, I highly encourage that, but be careful that you’re not mixing unit and integration tests in the same fixture.

Now, addressing the comment that “‘Widget’ and ‘WidgetFactory’ are both custom types” and that your project “doesn’t know what a Widget is” is a different matter. You need to start making use of interfaces and polymorphism in your code. Your code shouldn’t ever depend on a specific implementation of a widget, it should depend on an interface. What you have there is a classic case of high-level code knowing too much about implementation details. Fixing this problem with the way the code is “wired up” will also address the problem you have with needing to compile anytime a small change is made a test needs to be rerun. You’ll only need a full compile when the interface changes, not the body of the methods.