This article has first appeared in Today Software Magazine.
Why Spock?
When we first started working on our project at work, we searched for an easy-to-use tool that would help us write readable and concise tests. We chose Spock, because in combination with Groovy it provided exactly what we needed: readable BDD-style tests that we could write fast and change easily. Keep in mind that Spock can also be used in combination with Java, but has a great synergy with Groovy.
All the examples in this article are written in Groovy, but fear not! If you are a little bit familiar with Java, you will see that you can read Groovy code. Because our project’s tests examples would have been too complicated for a Spock introduction, I have chosen examples from a kata I coded to practice TDD.
1. Getting started
Adding Spock with Gradle is easy. This is my build.gradle file:
apply plugin: ‘groovy’
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
testCompile(
‘junit:junit:4.12’,
‘org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.4.4’,
‘org.spockframework:spock-core:1.0-groovy-2.4’,
)
testRuntime(
// for spock reports
‘com.athaydes:spock-reports:1.2.7’
)
}
Write the first falling test:
import spock.lang.Specification
class SeeIfItWorksSpec extends Specification {
def “it should fail”() {
expect:
false
}
}
The output is:
Condition not satisfied:
false
Afterwards, replace false with true. If the output is “Tests PASSED”, your setup is complete.
Read the complete article here.
