by Dori Reuveni and Kurt Alfred Kluever

This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT episode and post it in your office.

As engineers, we spend most of our time reading existing code, rather than writing new code. Therefore, we must make sure we always write clean, readable code. The same goes for our tests; we need a way to clearly express our test assertions.

Truth is an open source, fluent testing framework for Java designed to make your test assertions and failure messages more readable. The fluent API makes reading (and writing) test assertions much more natural, prose-like, and discoverable in your IDE via autocomplete. For example, compare how the following assertion reads with JUnit vs. Truth:

assertEquals("March", monthMap.get(3));          // JUnit
assertThat(monthMap).containsEntry(3, "March");  // Truth

Both statements are asserting the same thing, but the assertion written with Truth can be easily read from left to right, while the JUnit example requires "mental backtracking".

Another benefit of Truth over JUnit is the addition of useful default failure messages. For example:

ImmutableSet<String> colors = ImmutableSet.of("red", "green", "blue", "yellow");
assertTrue(colors.contains("orange"));  // JUnit
assertThat(colors).contains("orange");  // Truth

In this example, both assertions will fail, but JUnit will not provide a useful failure message. However, Truth will provide a clear and concise failure message:

AssertionError: <[red, green, blue, yellow]> should have contained <orange>

Truth already supports specialized assertions for most of the common JDK types (Objects, primitives, arrays, Strings, Classes, Comparables, Iterables, Collections, Lists, Sets, Maps, etc.), as well as some Guava types (Optionals). Additional support for other popular types is planned as well (Throwables, Iterators, Multimaps, UnsignedIntegers, UnsignedLongs, etc.).

Truth is also user-extensible: you can easily write a Truth subject to make fluent assertions about your own custom types. By creating your own custom subject, both your assertion API and your failure messages can be domain-specific.

Truth's goal is not to replace JUnit assertions, but to improve the readability of complex assertions and their failure messages. JUnit assertions and Truth assertions can (and often do) live side by side in tests.

To get started with Truth, check out http://google.github.io/truth/