datadriven VS Spock

Table driven tests are a lot better than a bunch of imperative tests but they rapidly become unwieldy to debug, maintain, and evolve. Their readability often isn’t great.

If you’re using go, check out https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven. It takes a little bit of effort to craft a testing dsl, but it is so worth it.

Also, snapshot style testing where the test writes out its expectations and you just inspect it and save it (part of datadriven) is wonderful.

I’ve been using insta in rust lately and it’s some of what I want but not quite datadriven.

I’ve found the datadriven[1] testing approach in go to be quite effective. The idea is that you leverage a standardized file structure to construct a little DSL for testing your code. This allows you to write expressive tests that print the state of the code and then look at it. Rewrite is also very powerful.

This is all inspired by the sqllite logic test framework.

[1]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/datadriven

I love using the Spock framework for its simplicity, readability, and maintainability. That's why we use Spock to drive our integration tests.

Well I care a lot that it exists. And many other people I know do as well. Just because you don't seem to like it, you shouldn't imagine everyone else is like you.

Maybe Grails is no longer used as much (like Rails itself), but Groovy found other usages since then, like https://spockframework.org/ and Jenkins pipelines (https://www.jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/syntax/). It's not going anywhere, and I see no reason for anyone to be upset about it.

In my opinion it is Spock for Java/Groovy [1]. The amount of functionality and readability you can squeeze from Groovy's DSLesque is absurd. Is basically a full fledged new test language with Java sprinkled as the test contents code

[1]: https://spockframework.org/

Groovy allows you to perform transforms on it's AST. If you look at the Spock framework, they used AST transforms to pull off a lot of the DSL.

Spock and Cucumber exemplify the philosophy of behavior-driven development (BDD). The principle behind BDD is that you must first define the desired result of the added feature in a subject-oriented language before writing any tests. The developers are then given the final documentation.

As a quick demonstration, the following (Spock) test asserts that the client JVM code fails to create an SSL connection with the service. Note that I chose to use Vert.x Web Client to handle interacting with the service, but don't let this decision distract from the core content of this post. Nevertheless, if you haven't used Vert.x, I encourage you to try it out -- especially for building server-side network applications.