Matthias Noback has a new post today, part one in a series, looking at moving away from assertion-centric testing and more towards descriptive unit tests.

In the introduction article of this series I quickly mentioned that I think unit testing often focuses too much on assertions. [...] I used to preach these things myself too (yes, "development with tests" often comes with a lot of preaching). But now I don't follow these rules anymore. I will shortly explain my reasons. But before I do, let's take a step back and consider something that is known as the Test framework in a tweet, by Mathias Verraes.

He breaks up the rest of the article into three sections, each with a few paragraphs of description and code where appropriate:

• Something is the case, or not
• Only one assertion for each test?
• Write assertions first and then work towards them?

He talks about the idea of "Arrange Act Assert" and makes some recommendations as to how to be more descriptive in your tests and make them easier to read and follow in the future.