Uspec

Uspec is a shiny little testing framework for your apps!

Anthony M. Cook 2013

Philosophy / Why Uspec?

Unlike other testing frameworks there's no need for special matchers, there can only be one assertion per test, and you never have to worry that your tests lack assertions.

That's because when the spec block is evaluated the return value is used (in a very ruby-like way) to determine the validity of the statement. Standard Ruby comparisons are your friend! No more digging around in your test framework's documentation to figure out what matcher you're supposed to use.

You can't tell here in the docs, but Uspec's output is in beautiful ansi technicolor, with red for failures, green for successes, and yellow for pending specs. Download it and give it a show, its painless and uber easy to use. :)

Usage

I suggest creating a uspec directory in your project folder to put your specs in. Then you'll need this incantation:

require 'uspec'
extend Uspec

You can slot it in the top of your test file, or if you have other setup code you can put it in a uspec_helper.rb and relative_require 'uspec_helper' in them instead.

Then all you have to do is put in your specs:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate.include? 'Cool'
end

If it passes:

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: true

If it fails:

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: false

If it throws an error:

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name: Exception

    Encountered an Exception while running spec
    at uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:3: in `<main>'

    RuntimeError < StandardError: 'wtf'

    /Users/Dude/Projects/Awesome/lib/awesome_mc_coolname.rb:18:in `explode'
    uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:4:in `block in <main>'

If you create a spec that doesn't return a boolean value (nil doesn't count either!) like this:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate =~ /Badass/
end

Then Uspec will let you know:

 -- AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a badass name: Unknown Result

    Spec did not return a boolean value
    at uspec/awesome_mc_coolname_spec.rb:6: in `<main>'

    Integer < Numeric: 5

Instead of =~ (which returns either index or nil) Ruby has the nifty include? method, which returns a boolean:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  AwesomeMcCoolname.generate.include? 'Badass'
end

If you really need to regex, you can always use Ruby's !! idiom to coerce a boolean out of any result, but its more precise to specify the index if you know it. And you can always toss in an || to drop in more information if a comparison fails too:

spec 'AwesomeMcCoolname.generate creates a cool name' do
  index = AwesomeMcCoolname.generate =~ /Badass/
  index == 0 || index
end

If you aren't ready to fill out a spec, maybe as a reminder to add functionality later, just leave off the block and it will be marked as pending:

spec 'a feature I have not implemented yet'

When you run the test Uspec will helpfully display:

 -- a feature I have not implemented yet: pending

What if you want to test that an error has occured? Just use Ruby!

spec 'calling AwesomeMcCoolname.awesomeness without specifying the awesomeness level should explode' do
  begin
    AwesomeMcCoolname.awesomeness
  rescue => error
    error.class == ArgumentError || raise
  end
end

If there's no error, then Uspec will see the result of the method call (whatever it might be). If the wrong Exception is raised, then because of reraising (by just calling raise without parameters), Ruby will dutifully pass along the error for Uspec to display.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'uspec'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install uspec

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request