While we are discussing colors, what should we do about a test that does not
make any assertions at all?
A couple of years ago, a smart student who was working on a testing dialect for
me decided that such tests should be in a new category all of their own. Later
I simplified things and just made these tests fail. I am pretty convinced now
that this is the right behaviour. It certainly suits my purposes (teaching
TDD); if the student omits to make any assertions, they have a failing test.
The message is: "Failure: test made no assertions".
Currently, such a test is green in Pharo. In 2013, I filed a bug report on a
bunch of tests of #printOn: on collections that made no assertions. (The test
writer didn’t understand how streams worked, and made assertions for each
element of the empty string.) I was reminded of this just this week, because
those tests have yet to be fixed. I suspect that if they had been yellow,
rather than green, then they would have been fixed before now.
I plan to fix those tests on Friday, but I also wonder about changing the
behaviour of the testing framework. What do you think?
Andrew
