Lazyweb: are there testing regimes / frameworks that require / encourage each test case to be accompanied with a (natural language) rationale? eg not just the input and expected output but WHY that output is the expected one? cc
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Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is what comes to mind for me, at least! RSpec is one example of a DSL for doing this: rspec.info
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"it" seems to provide room to generalise beyond the specific test case, although I wonder how often it is used that way. (c.f. semaphoreci.com/community/tuto) cc where many of the examples simply restate the expected output)
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Not sure if this is what you mean, but there are ways of having 'shared examples' which I definitely used in practice (back when I did Ruby for my day job): relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-co
RSpec is kind of a fascinating use of dynamic scoping+lazy evaluation, implemented by piggybacking on top of inheritance. Each `:let` definition is actually translated into a class member, and each new scope is a subclass of its parent scope.
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Was kind of terrifying when I first encountered it and then learned how it worked, but is actually super handy in practice. You do need to be careful not to let it turn into a mess though. 😅
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