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Clojure contrib comes with a testing framework test-is. Even though it is a small library it does its job. test-is consists many useful functions and macros to help us test our code. I am going to go through some of them and show some examples. Some examples I took it from http://richhickey.github.com/clojure-contrib/test-is-api.html

deftest
Is a macro to define a test function.

Usage

(deftest name & body)

Example

(deftest test-addition
   (is (= (+ 1 2) 3)))

is
It is a generic assertion macro. You will end up using this a lot in your test code.

Usage

(is form)
(is form msg)

Examples

(is (= (+ 1 2) 3))

[or]

user> (is (= (+ 2 1) 3) "should be 3")
true
user> (is (= (+ 3 1) 3) "should be 3")

FAIL in clojure.lang.PersistentList$EmptyList@1 (NO_SOURCE_FILE:1)
should be 3
expected: (= (+ 3 1) 3)
actual: (not (= 4 3))
false

This “is” macro could be used to test exceptions too.

(is (thrown? c body))
(is (thrown-with-msg? c re body))

are

Sometimes just using “is” will become tedious.

(deftest test-addition
   (is (= (+ 2 1) 3))
   (is (= (+ 0 0) 0))
   (is (= (+ -1 -1) -2)))

Using “are” we could clean up this test function as

(deftest test-addition
  (are [x y] (= x y)
     3 (+ 2 1)
     0 (+ 0 0)
     -2 (+ -1 -1)))

The only problem using “are” is when a test fails it screws up line number where failure happened.

testing

This is my favorite macro. It allows me organize my tests.

Lets take this test

(deftest test-addition
   (is (= (+ 2 1) 3))
   (is (= (+ 0 0) 0))
   (is (= (+ -1 -1) -2)))

Imagine it is doing some complicated stuff. This test does not express intent. Using “testing” we can rewrite

(deftest test-addition
   (testing "should add positive numbers"
      (is (= (+ 2 1) 3)))
   (testing "should add zeros"
     (is (= (+ 0 0) 0)))
   (testing "should be able to add negative numbers"
      (is (= (+ -1 -1) -2))))

The best part if a test fails it prints the string next to “testing”

(test-addition)

FAIL in (test-addition) (NO_SOURCE_FILE:1)
should be able to add negative numbers
expected: (= (+ -1 -1) -3)
actual: (not (= -2 -3))

Happy testing …