Spock: Up and Running

Introduction

Welcome to Spock: Up and Running. I’m excited and privileged to be your guide as you learn about the most innovative thing to happen to testing on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) since the first release of JUnit.

From the time I first began writing unit tests (badly), I’ve always been interested in making my tests as well-structured, readable, and straightforward as possible. I embraced the move from JUnit 3 to JUnit 4 with Hamcrest and have experimented with everything from FitNesse to Cucumber, TestNG to Jasmine, and ScalaTest to Spek. I don’t think anything has made the impact on my testing style that Spock has.

For me, Spock is absolutely the “killer app” of the Groovy ecosystem. Sure, GPars made concurrency easy, Gradle saved builds from XML hell, and Grails made throwing together the basics of a web app the work of minutes rather than hours. But nothing exploits Groovy’s dynamic style to build something that genuinely makes things easier and better as successfully as Spock.

And Spock makes things better not just for the 80 percent of cases, but across the board. I have every respect in the world for JUnit—it’s without doubt one of the most important innovations in the history of the JVM—but I can’t think of any case I can tackle better with JUnit than I can with Spock.

I hope you find Spock as logical, fascinating, and useful as I do.

Meet Spock

Spock is a test framework—some would even say language—built on top of Groovy. It was developed by Peter Niederwieser, ...