Writing Tests

Let’s say we have a library hello_world.rb that consists of the class HelloWorld with method #to_s:

class HelloWorld
  def to_s
    "Hello, World!"
  end
end

We would write a Lemon test case along the following lines:

Covers 'hello_world'

TestClass HelloWorld do
  Unit :to_s do
    Test "returns the world famous phrase" do
      HelloWorld.new.to_s.assert == "Hello, World!"
    end
  end
end

Clearly this an overly simplistic example, but it demonstrates well enough the basic design of Lemon tests. Notice that the #TestCase method references a class (this can also be a module) and the units each refer to a method of the class.

Assertions

Lemon uses the Assertive Expressive assertions framework. This is the same versitile framework used by Q.E.D.. By default Lemon tests support the standard #assert and #expect assertion methods. If you wish to use subjunctive terms, either #should or #must, you can load these via a helper script (eg. require 'ae/should').

Concern/Setup Method

Lemon provides a concern method #Concern, and alias #Setup method, as before advice for each
test. Using this, the example given at the top of the page could be written:

Covers 'hello_world'

TestClass HelloWorld do
  Concern "String output works as expected." do
    @hw = HelloWord.new
  end

  Unit :to_s do
    Test "returns the world famous phrase" do
      @hw.to_s.assert == "Hello, World!"
    end
  end
end

Teardown

To complement the concern methods, Lemon provides #Teardown, which can be used to run a procedure after each unit test.

Before and After

The #Before and #After methods can be used to define specialized advice procedures, triggered my pattern matching to method name and/or test descriptions.

Method Caps

Capitalized method names for Lemon’s syntax were originally chosen to help ensure any name clashes with code to be tested. At the time the methods were defined in the Kernel and tests were evaluated at the toplevel, so it seemed a prudent precaution. The current implementation runs the tests within the scope of a special object (TestSuite::DSL), so there is no potential for name clash. For this reason, lower case variety of the name methods have been made available in the newest release of Lemon. For example:

covers 'hello_world'

test_class HelloWorld do
  concern "String output works as expected." do
    HelloWord.new
  end

  unit :to_s do
    test "returns the world famous phrase" do
      @hw.to_s.assert == "Hello, World!"
    end
  end
end

Even though we can now use lower-case method names, per the usual Ruby practice, I have become accustomed to the upper-case variety at this point, so have no to intention of deprecating them. Use which ever you prefer.