Comments on: Don’t propagate exceptions in test fixtures

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 10:39:25 +0000

Yup, thought of that almost as soon as I pressed the post button. Must remember to live in the real world.

By: Robert Watkins

Robert Watkins — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:25:50 +0000

Unfortunately, as soon as you get two tests in a test class, you have the chance that the “setup” may not be as common as you would like.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 14:52:12 +0000

Ideally you would do the setup of the “test” instance in the setUp() method of your test class, and therefore leaving your test method signature pristine …. ok, so maybe I like to fantasize.

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 07:52:35 +0000

Readability. My test code is a good indication of what my production code that will use the code under test will be like. If I have exceptions being thrown all over the place, then that’s a problem.

As said, I don’t have problems with the _production_ exceptions being on the test method. I have problems with the _test_ exceptions being on the test method, because it means I can’t see what production exceptions are coming out.

I have the same problem with methods that regularly declare they throw some base Exception (be it java.lang.Exception or a project-level Exception). You’ve reduced the amount of information content in the code.

By: Alexey Verkhovsky

Alexey Verkhovsky — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 23:35:27 +0000

I declare all my unit tests as “throws Throwable”, and never catch an exception in test code except in “try/fail/catch expected” idiom. Live happily ever after.

Which sort of makes me curious – what value do you get from matching the throws clause of a test with the method under test?