From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2004-04-18T21:32:35+09:00
Subject: Re: test / unit question:  add "Warnings" to Failures and Errors

Nathaniel Talbott wrote:
> Bret, you've pretty well summed up my reaction to this. I've just 
> recently been dealing with some pretty mucked up (Java) code, and the 
> last thing I'd want to provide those developers with is another way to 
> not complete functionality. So I won't propagate such abilities in to 
> Test::Unit.

I certainly agree that for unit tests, you are looking for a binary 
outcome; either pass or fail.  No argument there.

However, I'm looking into using Test::Unit in some different scenarios. 
  When coupled with something like Ara's session module, Ruby makes a 
good scripting language for acceptance testing command line programs. 
Unlike unit test, acceptance/functional tests can be (should be) written 
early in an iteration before the code supporting them is ready.

What I would like to see (not in Test::Unit directly, but in some 
acceptance testing framework built on Test::Unit) the ability to declare 
the expected outcome of a test, much like the DejaGNU testing framework. 
  The framework could catch expected failures and unexpected passes. 
Once a feature is implemented, it moves from an expected failure to an 
expected pass.

Just some thoughts.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim@weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)