Unit tests are very useful for those large projects where you might loose sight of everything that’s going on and while you are adding new code to add feature X you might be silently breaking feature Y without even suspecting. It’s super easy these days to add unit tests to your Xcode project – when you create new Xcode project just check the checkbox in the save dialogue and voila everything is setup automatically for you:
This will add unit testing to your project and when you click Product->Test from Xcode’s menu your unit test will be run. Cool and smooth.
Let’s have a look at the default unit test, which is created for you- you get a folder called “[Project name]Tests” and inside there’s one test pre-set for you. Open the .m file and find the only test inside:
- (void)testExample { STFail(@"Unit tests are not implemented yet in utb_testTests"); }
It’s designed so that it’ll fail by default. Eventually if you run the tests (Cmd+U) you’ll see the tests fail (though my experience shows even this simple example test will succeed for no reason many times):
So in this article I’m not going to explain how unit tests work and so on, but I’d rather cover how to overcome some obstacles if you are writing unit tests for block based APIs.
