If you follow me on twitter @paytonrules you’ve probably seen me griping at various times about writing a testing framework for Objective-C.
I’m currently writing my first expectations, and bootstrapping a testing framework continues to be an interesting problem, which I’ll probably write more about later.
I find I continually have to go backwards on the tests to clean them, because as I implement more features I start using them in earlier tests. Meanwhile I want to clean the test I’ve recently written, often without the benefits of features I don’t have yet.
The code below are the tests for my first expectations. Currently I see a lot of duplication, and I’m curious how you might go about cleaning it with the framework in it’s current state. Keep in mind these rules:
I don’t have a before or after feature yet, and since some developers swear that using before and after is a bad practice, you can’t use that.
I don’t have expectations that take primitive types, which is why you see expect(obj) in some places, but a crude check then FAIL in others. I will, but don’t yet.
By using this DSL you don’t have access to a class to put variables on like you would in an XUnit style test. I have no idea of OCMock will work for mocking objects in my framework yet.
Eric Smith is a fan of the Chicago Bears, Chicago Cubs, and Bruce Springsteen; and he’s the recent author of Game Development with Rust and WebAssembly, published by Packt. Eric is a consummate polyglot, with more than a decade of experience leading development teams and delivering software for global enterprise systems. He has also delivered native Android and iOS apps at every stage of their lifecycle.