I use JUnit, PHPUnit and Perl’s Test::Unit. Perl’s version has a very cool feature. You can call annotate(string) at any point during the test, and this text will get recorded, and only outputted in the case of the test’s failure. 

sub test_foo {
   my $self = shift;
   my $value = setup_something();
   $self->annotate("value = $value \n");
   $self->assert_equals(12, do_something($value));
}

So you can just log arbitrary stuff during the test, and it will be output when you need it (when the test fails), but won’t clutter up the test output (when the test succeeds).

I wish this was available from the PHP and Java unit testing frameworks!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Coding, Perl. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.