minitest provides a complete suite of testing facilities supporting
TDD, BDD, mocking, and benchmarking.
"I had a class with Jim Weirich on testing last week and we were
allowed to choose our testing frameworks. Kirk Haines and I were
paired up and we cracked open the code for a few test
frameworks...
I MUST say that minitest is *very* readable / understandable
compared to the 'other two' options we looked at. Nicely done and
thank you for helping us keep our mental sanity."
-- Wayne E. Seguin
minitest/test is a small and incredibly fast unit testing framework.
It provides a rich set of assertions to make your tests clean and
readable.
minitest/spec is a functionally complete spec engine. It hooks onto
minitest/test and seamlessly bridges test assertions over to spec
expectations.
minitest/benchmark is an awesome way to assert the performance of your
algorithms in a repeatable manner. Now you can assert that your newb
co-worker doesn't replace your linear algorithm with an exponential
one!
minitest/mock by Steven Baker, is a beautifully tiny mock (and stub)
object framework.
minitest/pride shows pride in testing and adds coloring to your test
output. I guess it is an example of how to write IO pipes too. :P
minitest/test is meant to have a clean implementation for language
implementors that need a minimal set of methods to bootstrap a working
test suite. For example, there is no magic involved for test-case
discovery.
"Again, I can't praise enough the idea of a testing/specing
framework that I can actually read in full in one sitting!"
-- Piotr Szotkowski
Comparing to rspec:
rspec is a testing DSL. minitest is ruby.
-- Adam Hawkins, "Bow Before MiniTest"
minitest doesn't reinvent anything that ruby already provides, like:
classes, modules, inheritance, methods. This means you only have to
learn ruby to use minitest and all of your regular OO practices like
extract-method refactorings still apply.