Last week, Rob announced Micronaut, our new BDD framework written by Chad Humphries. I’ve been itching to write about Micronaut as well, and my take on it is similar to Rob’s, although I start with a very different perspective.

It’s a little surprising that I’m excited about Micronaut. I’m sort of a Ruby old-timer, and I’ve never been that excited about RSpec or any of the other Ruby test frameworks that have appeared over the last few years. Yes, they offer some advantages in some cases, but I’ve always seen the improvements as incremental rather than revolutionary. I like RSpec’s facilities for structuring tests, but should never struck me as a radical improvement in expressiveness. In fact, I frequently run into situations where I think a well-crafted assertion is much clearer than a should expression.

I just never got the BDD religion, in other words.

What I like about Micronaut is that its innovation is mostly under the hood, rather than on the surface. Rather than designing some new variation on how we express our tests, Chad opted for RSpec compatibility and built a really nice engine for loading and running RSpec-style tests. Architecture matters, and Micronaut’s architecture is a joy.

First of all, as Rob noted, Micronaut is small, easy to understand, and fast. That makes it fun to hack on, and great to use on projects. It also gives me confidence; simple tools tend to be more robust, and I want that in my testing tool.

Second, Micronaut’s architecture provides a lot of flexibility. To illustrate that, while attending talks at QCon a couple weeks ago, I added test/unit compatibility to Micronaut. Here’s a short example that mirrors Rob’s example from last week, but in a test/unit style:

  require 'micronaut/unit'

  Micronaut.configure do |config|
    config.filter_run :focused => true
  end

  class MicronautMetadataTest < Micronaut::Unit::TestCase

    # 'testinfo' allows declaring metadata for a test, and works
    # like Rake's 'desc' method: it applies to the next test.
  
    testinfo :focused => true
    def test_this_will_definitely_run    
      assert self.running_example.metadata[:focused]
    end

    def test_this_never_runs
      flunk "shouldn't run while other specs are focused"
    end

    testinfo :pending => true
    def test_this_is_pending
    end

    testinfo :speed => 'slow'
    def test_too_slow_to_run_all_the_time
      sleep(10000)
      assert_equal 4, 2+2
    end
  end

I don’t know how interesting test/unit compatibility is in its own right. I certainly wouldn’t claim that the example above is superior to the RSpec equivalent. But it was a fun exercise to really prove Micronaut’s design. It only took a few hours (of partial attention) and it clocks in at under 200 lines of code (plus `assertions.rb` from the test/unit codebase). I love the idea of the testing API and the test execution engine not being so tightly coupled. And it might be very useful if you have existing tests written with test/unit and you’d like to gain the benefit of Micronaut’s metadata support.

Which brings me to Micronaut’s best feature. Almost all unit-testing frameworks incorporate some support for test suites, but suites have never lived up to their promise. It would be nice to have tests organized in suites for distinct purposes, but the setup and maintenance costs associated with suites have meant that very few teams make good use of them. Micronaut’s metadata is a different—and much better—solution to the same problem. As some have noted, the idea is similar to Cucumber’s support for tags. Just attach metadata of your choice to Micronaut tests or examples, and then you can use that metadata to select what tests are run in different situations.

At the moment, test/unit compatibility is only available in my fork of Micronaut. It allows using RSpec-style describe and it blocks alongside test/unit-style test methods, and supports test blocks à la Context and ActiveSupport. I don’t think we’ll pull this completely into Micronaut; I think it would work better as a separate gem. But I’d love to get your feedback about the whole idea.