Chris's Blog

Ruby does not throw any exceptions or warnings if an object defines two methods with the same name. The second definition always wins. While this provides great flexibility for many Ruby tasks it can be problematic when writing tests. In particular, if you define two tests with same name in the same test class, one will get run and the other will not. If you have been writing tests for a while you understand that there is nothing worse than writing a test that never gets used!

Recently Matthew O'Connor and I set out to fix this problem for Test::Unit by alias method chaining :method_added for TestCase classes and their subclasses. We use the inherited hook on Ruby classes to dynamically define a method_added hook for every test case. This is required because method_added does not get inherited between classes, so it can't be defined only in Test::Unit::TestCase.

The following patch raises an exception if it detects a duplicated test name.

class Test::Unit::TestCase
  class << self
    def known_test_methods
      @known_test_methods ||= Array.new
    end

    def record_test_method(method)
      if method.to_s.starts_with?("test")
        if known_test_methods.include? method
          raise "Duplicate test #{self}##{method}"
        else
          known_test_methods << method
        end
      end
    end

    def inherited(subclass)
      class << subclass
        def method_added_with_duplicate_check(method)
          record_test_method(method)
          method_added_without_duplicate_check(method)
        end
        alias_method_chain :method_added, :duplicate_check unless method_defined?(:method_added_without_duplicate_check)
      end
    end
  end
end

When we first tried this against a legacy code base we found almost a dozen duplicated tests that were not running.