How to add description to failed unit tests?

General Usage
6

I didn’t mean to imply that I’m certain you’ll find it satisfactory and I’m sorry if it came off that way. There is obviously no one size fits all for how to apply “started using more descriptive names”.

Just to make it clear there is no magic, here is one example with your MWE:

julia> l2_error_expected = [0.1];

julia> l2_error_measured = [0.11];

julia> @test l2_error_expected[1] ≈ l2_error_measured[1]
Test Failed at none:1
  Expression: l2_error_expected[1] ≈ l2_error_measured[1]
   Evaluated: 0.1 ≈ 0.11

To me this is pretty readble and has the advantage that it will look familiar to anyone who is used to the julia framework

One nifty thing that at least I discovered quite late which in some cases can mitigate the “too many testsets” issue is that it is possible to loop in testsets, generating one set for each iterable.

julia> @testset "Dummy" begin
       @testset "test for $i" for i in 1:5
       @test min(3,i) == i
       end
       end

Test Summary: | Pass  Fail  Total
Dummy         |    3     2      5
  test for 1  |    1            1
  test for 2  |    1            1
  test for 3  |    1            1
  test for 4  |          1      1
  test for 5  |          1      1

# Outer testset supress visual noise if successful
julia> @testset "Dummy" begin
       @testset "test for $i" for i in 1:3
       @test min(3,i) == i
       end
       end
Test Summary: | Pass  Total
Dummy         |    3      3

Matter of taste ofc, but I find this visually appealing. May or may not apply in your case though.

w.r.t the macro, yeah, you’d want to rethrow the caught error. Not sure if this is enough to not muck up the testframework as I haven’t tested it.

4 Likes