Testing with Spock

[donaldsiziba]

After watching the TDD and Clean Architecture - Use Case Driven Development presentation by @valentinacupac, I reached out to her with a suggestion if she would consider writing her tests using Spock. Spock is an alternative test framework written in Groovy.

I usually use Spock for my tests because I love how expressive it is.
Here are some cool features of Spock:

• Although Spock is written in Groovy, it can test both Java and Groovy code.
• Spock follows the given-when-then flow which is commonly associated with the BDD paradigm.
• Spock tests have the ability to include full English sentences in their code structures,
  allowing for easy documentation.
• Spock tests have the ability to include full English sentences in their code structures,
  allowing for easy documentation.
• Spock has built-in support for mocking and stubbing without an external
  library.
• You can use Spock to start learning another programming language, Groovy, that runs on the JVM.

Here is a TDD Kata that I did years ago - I use Spock for the test cases.

[valentinajemuovic]

Thanks @donaldsiziba for the suggestion, I merged the PR, so now the demo example shows both the usage of jUnit and Spock.

I hadn't used Spock, but want to look into it more.

The interesting thing about Spock is that it's like Cucumber, but inline, and as you mentioned serves the full English sentences can be served to provide easy documentation, so that this documentation can be shared with business.

The other alternative is making one's own custom DSL.

The disadvantage I would see is if the tests are read-only by developers, then the full English sentences add overhead.

What are the possibilities regarding documentation generation?

[mikewojtyna]

I used Spock in some projects. I love the idea. Unfortunately, the dynamic nature of Grooby makes it very hard to do refactors. We had a lot of issues which resulted in broken tests after applying only structural refactor. Therefore, in the current project we decided to use JUnit 5 with descriptive @DisplayName written in full sentecnes using multiline string blocks, e.g.:

@DisplayName("Tic Tac Toe game")
class TicTacToeTest {

    // @formatter:off
    @DisplayName(
        """
         given X player made the move at (0,0),
         when O player makes the move at (1,0),
         then first row is XO_
        """
    )
    // @formatter:on
    @Test
    void moveTest() {
        // given
        var board = new Board();
        var ticTacToe = new TicTacToe(board);
        ticTacToe.makeNextMove(new Coordinates(0, 0));

        // when
        ticTacToe.makeNextMove(new Coordinates(1, 0));

        // then
        var state = ticTacToe.state();
        assertThat(state.boardArray()).isDeepEqualTo(new char[][]{
                {'X', 'O', '_'},
                {'_', '_', '_'},
                {'_', '_', '_'}
        });
    }
}