Unit Test Naming Conventions

Introduction

Naming tests in a robust and informative way is an important aspect of writing tests. The importance of correct naming is arguably more important than the naming of the application code. This is because although application code naming is important, the expressiveness of application code is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of brevity.

In the case of test code, however, the brevity of names is sacrificed for expressiveness. This is because test code is seen as a form of documentation. If a software engineer is introduced to the code, their familiarization process is significantly enhanced through the reading of the various test cases. In turn, understanding test cases are enhanced through descriptive naming.

The importance of correct naming

Unit tests are seen as a form of documentation that enables software engineers to familiarize themselves with the code. Therefore, from a pure documentation point of view, precise naming is extremely important. However, from the point of view of running tests themselves, naming holds no value. NUnit does not implicitly rely on any naming conventions to run tests. Therefore, names could be arbitrarily changed, and the tests would still run.

Unit test areas requiring good naming

There are four ...