Better Unit Tests with ApprovalTests: An Open Source Library

When a Unit Test fails I want clear, expressive, and rich feedback so I can quickly understand the nature of the failure and get a good idea of what I need to do to fix it. Unit Testing frameworks are fantastic at catching a failing test and alerting me to the failure, but sometimes (make that often?) the details of the failure are a bit difficult for me to evaluate. I'm only human! Isn’t there some way to make the specifics “jump off the screen” so I don’t need to dig through the details on my own? And, could you please make this easy for me to set up so I can spend more time devising great tests and less time figuring out how to implement them? This is where ApprovalTests have helped me a lot. Let me demonstrate for you how to use ApprovalTests to easily get this kind of goodness – it works for everything from simple strings to arrays, GUIs, and complex objects. Plus, it’s FREE and available for C#, Java, PHP, and Ruby. How sweet it is!