When should you use which assert? It is a question developers new to unit tests may ask themselves.

It is easy as a seasoned developer to think that this is obvious. It isn't when you are learning.

I had a conversation today where the person I talked to used assertTrue and had a failing test. The reason why the test failed was not clear. I realized after our conversation that it might have been a better idea to use another assert. But why would that be a good idea? Let me give you an example that you can run and figure out the answer to that question yourself.

Different asserts report the result in different ways

I compare assertTrue and assertThat in the examples below. One of them will give me a better error report when something goes wrong.

My recommendation is that you run this test a few times and changes what complicatedFunction() returns to get a feeling why one of assertTrue and assertThat is better in many situations.

Run this code: 

package se.thinkcode;

import org.junit.Test;

import static org.hamcrest.core.Is.is;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertThat;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertTrue;

public class CompareAsserts {

    @Test
    public void assertTrueExample() {
        assertTrue(complicatedFunction().equals("bar"));

        String message = "Expected bar, got " + complicatedFunction();
        assertTrue(message, complicatedFunction().equals("bar"));
    }

    @Test
    public void assertThatExample() {
        assertThat(complicatedFunction(), is("bar"));
    }

    private String complicatedFunction() {
        return "bar";
    }
}

What happened? Did you get a feeling about the differences?

My I prefer assertThat in almost every situation. My motivation is that I get better feedback. You may have other opinions. I would be interested in hearing them.

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