From: Jean-Hugues ROBERT <jean_hugues_robert@...>
Date: 2004-05-29T21:22:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Test::Unit: assert_follows_spec() (or something like that)

At 20:38 29/05/2004 +0900, Florian wrote:
>>JeanHuguesRobert: About the generation of HTML documentation, I feel, again, that the
>>full spec is not easy to grab. I would rather like to see some RDoc
>>tool that would consider test cases as "examples".
>
>I'm currently embedding test cases into the documentation. They look a
>lot like example code. I think this is commonly called "Specification by
>example". I've written a tool for automatically extracting and running
>them. Here is an example:
>
>    # Matches the space between words.
>    # This is a zero-width anchor.
>    #
>    #   re = Regexp::English.word_boundary
>    #   text = "Hello World!"
>    #   text.gsub(re, "*") # => "*Hello* *World*!"
>    def word_boundary(....
>If this test case where to fail you would get an useful error like this:
>>  1) Failure:
>>test_word_boundary()
>>    [(eval):3:in `eval'
>>     (eval):7:in `test_word_boundary'
>>     (eval):3:in `test_word_boundary']:
>>c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/test/unit/assertions.rb:32:in `assert_block'<"\"*Hello* *World*!\""> expected but was <"\"Hello World!\"">.
>
>Regards,
>Florian Gross

This is definitely nice to me. Additionaly I don't like so much the idea of large distance between the code and the test code. But in your scheme a least part of the test code is close, right before the tested code, that's good I think.

"xxx # => something" is apparently a well accepted convention to describe the expected result of some code. I guess that some "standard" is needed to fully describe the expected result beyond simple cases.

I suspect that the error msg could be improved slightly, you most probably want to know the exact file/lineno where the assert failed. This may require some changes in test/unit that you probably will propose once your code is complete.

Keep me posted.

Yours,

Jean-Hugues Robert



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