Question

For writing unit tests, I know it’s very popular to write test methods that look like

public void Can_User_Authenticate_With_Bad_Password()
{
...
}

While this makes it easy to see what the test is testing for, I think it looks ugly and it doesn’t display well in auto-generated documentation (like sandcastle or javadoc).

I’m interested to see what people think about using a naming schema that is the method being tested and underscore test and then the test number. Then using the XML code document(.net) or the javadoc comments to describe what is being tested.

/// <summary>
/// Tests for user authentication with a bad password.
/// </summary>
public void AuthenticateUser_Test1()
{
...
}

by doing this I can easily group my tests together by what methods they are testing, I can see how may test I have for a given method, and I still have a full description of what is being tested.

we have some regression tests that run vs a data source (an xml file), and these file may be updated by someone without access to the source code (QA monkey) and they need to be able to read what is being tested and where, to update the data sources.

Answer 1

What about changing

Can_User_Authenticate_With_Bad_Password

to

AuthenticateDenieTest
AuthenticateAcceptTest

and name suit something like User