Question

I’ve seen today a non standard way of writing unit tests with JUnit,

instead of using the framework checks

Assert.assertTrue("Unexpected response encoding", text.length() >= 1);

a generic exception is thrown

if (text.length() < 1) {
    throw new Exception("Unexpected response encoding");
}

I want to to convince the author to adopt the first style. Beside reason like verbosity, clarity of intent do you know what else can differ in these approaches?

Answer 1

Their treatment in report is different in two ways:

1. As mentioned by @Matt, one is failure while other is error.
2. Imagene Assert.assertEquals, when failed, it reports both expected and found values in the report along with the message.