It sounds like what you're doing is more testing implementation. That's not what TDD as it has been pubilicized widely is. TDD is about testing interfaces rather than implementation (though the line is admittedly blurry at times).

Personally, I can't follow you argument about having to look at the testcase to track down the failure; maybe if you only used a simple ok() function? The more expressive tests in Test::More like is() and friends will not only tell there was a failure but also what was expected and what happened; together with descriptive test names I almost never have to look into my testcases to track down a failure.

My own experience with doing interface tests inline is that this makes aggressive refactors hard (which runs contrary to the spirit of test-first development). I find that particularly the tests I write first often suggest a completely different direction than what the eventual structure of the code grows into. That doesn't hinder me; they're separate from the code, after all.

The Test:: modules were written with that approach in mind, and since you want something other than that, they obviously won't be a particularly good fit. That doesn't make them subpar in itself, it just means there's an impendance mismatch between your goals and theirs.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^5: Test/ Code Ratio by Aristotle
in thread Test/ Code Ratio by moot

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