Unit Testing without Assertions

Question

Occasionally I come accross a unit test that doesn\'t Assert anything. The particular example I came across this morning was testing that a log file got written to when a co

Answer 1

It can be a good pragmatic solution, especially if the alternative is no test at all.

The problem is that the test would pass if all the functions called were no-ops. But sometimes it just isn't feasible to verify the side effects are what you expected. In the ideal world there would be enough time to write the checks for every test ... but I don't live there.

The other place I've used this pattern is for embedding some performance tests in with unit tests because that was an easy way to get them run every build. The tests don't assert anything, but measure how long the test took and log that.