Test Document
Test documents are the files that contain the instructions of what ought to be tested and how to test it. They are the main entry point for working with scrut from the command line. All test documents contain zero or more test cases.
Document Formats
Scrut supports two formats for test documents:
- Markdown, the default and recommended format for writing test documents.
- Cram, supported for legacy reasons to run or migrate tests written for the now deprecated Cram framework
Document Writing Recommendations
Consider test documents not only as stashes for test cases, but also as documentation for the tested functionality. Maintaining CLIs, as any software, long term is a challenge. Using the Markdown format Scrut provides an opportunity to store knowledge about systems (i.e. behavior of the CLI) together with validation of that knowledge (the test cases).
File Structure Recommendation
There are two common patterns to structure test documents in Scrut:
- Coherent Test Suite (recommended): One test file represents one use-case or behavior. This makes it easy to identify broken functionality.
- List of Tests: One test file contains a list of simple, not necessarily related tests. This makes it easy to cover a lot of functionality quickly, but at the price of harder maintainability down the line.