From: Tim Bates <tim@...>
Date: 2003-01-09T20:21:30+09:00
Subject: Re: Test::Unit fails w/no tests [was: testunit 0.1.6 problems]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003 09:35 pm, NAKAMURA, Hiroshi wrote:
> > I like the failure when you have an empty TestCase for the XP YAGNI
> > reason you stated above.
>
> +1 to failure, to keep health of test.
> Empty testcase is exactly a bug of the testcase.

Not necessarily. And not everyone practises XP as such. (I don't like major 
parts of it, and other parts are just good sense). As a counterargument, I 
would like to put forth the following pieces of code:

===
# Would fail if empty, so I add something arbitrary to prevent this.
class TC_EmptySample
	def test_nothing
		'foo'
	end
end

# Will fail, just like I want.
class TC_ImplementLater
end
===

IMHO, this is a lot uglier than the alternative:

===
# Won't fail, just like I want.
class TC_EmptySample
end

# Want it to fail, to remind me to implement.
class TC_ImplementLater
	def test
		flunk("Not implemented!")
	end
end
===

The second example makes it quite clear what fails, and why.

On a related note, I can't get this failure to happen - must be exclusive to 
0.1.6 (I have 0.1.4) but I can't find the start of this thread. Can someone 
please tell me if you get this failure when subclassing a test case with an 
empty class? For example:

class TC_Super < Test::Unit::TestCase
	def testme
		assert_equal(2, 1+1, "Basic axioms of mathematics are wrong!")
	end
end

class TC_Sub < TC_Super
end

Does TC_Sub have this failure? If so, it will break my tests which is another 
argument against it...

Tim Bates
-- 
tim@bates.id.au