A test that asserts nothing has only asserted that the code ran through without throwing an error. :-)
I like your proposal that such a test is an inherently failing test. (Of course, that will result in the student adding a single assertion at the end, of the form "self assert: true"!) On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 4:07 PM, Prof. Andrew P. Black <bl...@cs.pdx.edu> wrote: > 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 > > >
