Hacker News Reader

Interesting, it sounds like you would benefit from breaking each test out into one that focuses on a single target state.

Another layer would be conditional test execution hierarchy where one early failure would skip a set of tests that depend on that state.

View on HN

I agree, but the tests are in the order of minutes (sometimes hours), not your typical unit tests. That's basically why it uses soft assertions, it's costly to run. Ideally you'd still want tests with a single assertion/target state, but it's hard to write it that way.

We also do have this conditional test hierarchy, but again it's hard to properly define when the system under test behaves unexpectedly...

> it's hard to properly define when the system under test behaves unexpectedly...

I feel your pain. I think at that point it's good to look deeper and ask if exceptions are being properly thrown, as I try to call for in the final section on Exceptions.

You can't plan for everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com