Thing is. It just does not matter THAT much. The case you describe is fairly rare in the xUnit world, or in any world I would guess.
The testing suite does not have a "will", it is only a tool. When the testing suite works, it just works; When people have confidence in it for some reason, then there is usually a reason behind that. Let me demonstrate with an example: A group of Java developers are using JUnit to write unit tests for their software. That software is being built and tested on a continuous integration server (the likes of CruiseControl). And they even went as far as to draw a graph and a report of the running unit tests. The know: - how many unit tests were executed each run - how much time each unit test took to run (and the total time) - which unit tests passed, and which failed - the behavior of some tests over time (a bad test can randomly fail/pass for example) If you would tell them that each time they write a unit test, they also need to go to some file and increment some counter. They would probably either not do it, or say you are crazy. The major idea is to make it easier for a developer to write stuff. Thats why people invent IDEs (I use vi personally). So that the actual developer will not be annoyed to do things that are much better done automatically, like for example update a counter each time he writes one line of test code. I wont argue that plan counter does not have its use. It probably does. But what it also does is annoy the developer. That is why you would probably see "no_plan" used in most of the testing code in the wild (I am not talking about CPAN). just my opinion, you are welcome to argue your reasons if you feel differently. - evgeny
