New and Improved Testing
In this webinar, we’ll introduce some of the major changes coming in testthat 3.0.0. The biggest new idea in testthat 3.0.0 is the idea of an edition. You must deliberately choose to use the 3rd edition, which allows us to make breaking changes without breaking old packages. testthat 3e deprecates a number of older functions that we no longer believe are a good idea, and tweaks the behavior of expect_equal() and expect_identical() to give considerably more informative output (using the new waldo package).
testthat 3e also introduces the idea of snapshot tests, which record expected value in external files rather than in code. This makes them particularly well suited to testing user output and complex objects. We’ll show off the main advantages of snapshot testing, and why it’s better than our previous approaches of verify_output() and expect_known_output().
Finally, we’ll go over a bunch of smaller quality-of-life improvements, including tweaks to test reporting and improvements to expect_error(), expect_warning() and expect_message().
Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr)and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
