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Comment by gnoack | Hacker News Reader

Admittedly the part about xUnit was a slight derail, but I felt it made some sense to mention, as an example for "the framework" invoking cleanup handlers for the developer.

The remark about unnecessary tearDown() hooks is probably worth a separate article and not a very compelling argument in such a short form.

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I can see where it's an attractive example for cleanup behavior, for sure. But I do think the distinction between code-level cleanup and domain-level cleanup is important. You can see the fixture management as part of the test code and then they align much more closely. It's usually better to not couple that way, though, and to think of automation as something that fulfills a test instead of being the test.

I also know there's a lot of debate over xUnit patterns and, in particular, setup/teardown. My take is that the perceived value depends on a lot on background and how much experience one has actually maintaining automation strategies over time. One of the bigger dangers is losing track of what you're testing so thoroughly that any confidence you might have rests essentially in magical belief instead of periodic review. That especially hits unit tests since they're added from multiple sources, and makes things like standardized fixtures/setup/teardowns pretty useful for alignment.

I'll keep a look out for future blog posts. I'm interested in your take.

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