Feature request: improve skipping

[adamcameron]

I'm porting my tests from PHPUnit. Today I've been looking at dealing with incomplete (markTestIncomplete) and skipped (markTestSkipped) tests.

One can kinda mark a test incomplete at compile-time by using xdescribe and xit, but it would be good to have a runtime way of doing it as well, similar to PHPUnit. That said I think 95% of the time handling this at compile time is fine, so low impact.

I note there is a skipIf method, but was surprised to see its implementation was void function skipIf(boolean condition), where I might have expected void function skipIf(string message, callback condition) to match the implementations of it and describe, and using the same analogy. At the very least void function skipIf(boolean condition[, string message]).

I think a message is reasonably handy when skipping tests.

I checked to see if there was a precedent in other similar frameworks:

• Jasmine doesn't seem to have skip yet, based on Implement "skip()" in Jasmine jasmine/jasmine#1709;
• however Mocha does (https://mochajs.org/#inclusive-tests), simply as skip().
• rspec handles skipping via in-code tags: https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/v/3-4/docs/pending-and-skipped-examples/skip-examples, with CLI options: https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/v/3-4/docs/command-line/tag-option

[jails]

I agree markTestIncomplete can be handled with xdescribe().
In regards to Mocha & Rspec, for them skip as the same meaning as xit of xdescribe.
To actually "skip" a test you need to progamatically add a if() condition somewhere so skipIf() is just a shortcut to avoid nested if braces. But indeed void function skipIf(boolean condition[, string message]) could be a good idea, we just need to think where is the best place for displaying this message.

[adamcameron]

Cheers for following this up.

I'd display it in exactly the same place / time / way as you display test failures / errors. Just in a different colour, and prefix it with SKIPPED, eg:

skipIf(true, "only test this on Tuesdays");

When reporting:

SKIPPED: only test this on Tuesdays

Maybe it's orange or light blue or something... indicates it's not completely good (green), but it's not necessarily a problem (red).