Moving back to Test::Unit?

I’ve been testing my applications and plugins with rspec for a while now. It really is a great testing framework. But occasionally I feel like it’s too complex. And in a way, I almost find its English-like syntax harder to parse than a plain old assertion.

Call me crazy, if you want to.

Really, the piece that I love about writing specs is how you don’t really write methods. You explain what the spec is testing with a string, and execute a block to match that behavior.

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it "should generate a token upon creating a valid user" do
  @user.token.should be_nil
  @user.save
  @user.token.should_not be_nil
end

That’s a nice API. It sure does beat those long test_* method names you end up with otherwise. And honestly, that (along with some desire to try out the latest and greatest) was my main reason for making the switch.

But now things are a bit different. Jay Fields introduced a similar pattern for Test::Unit, which now ships with Rails.

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def test(name, &block)
  test_name = "test_#{name.gsub(/\s+/,'_')}".to_sym
  defined = instance_method(test_name) rescue false
  raise "#{test_name} is already defined in #{self}" if defined
  if block_given?
    define_method(test_name, &block)
  else
    define_method(test_name) do
      flunk "No implementation provided for #{name}"
    end
  end
end

See there? Now that piece that I love about writing specs can be done with Test::Unit.

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test "should generate a token upon creating a valid user" do
  assert_nil user.token
  user.save
  assert_not_nil user.token
end

That’s about as straight-forward as it gets. Which, arguably, is what testing is all about. No need to complicate things. Granted, it’s more of a functional style than the Ruby-esque method chaining that rspec provides, but it still gets the job done. The sheer simplicity and explicitness of an assertion is starting to reel me back in.

I think the next project I work on that requires testing (yeah, yeah, they all should), I’m going to revisit Test::Unit. We’ll see how it goes.