How to mark a XCTest as pending?

Question

I have a subclass of XCTestCase and I would like to mark some test as pending, in the same way that is possible with RSpec

https://www.relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/v/2-0/docs/pending/pending-examples

Answer 1

There is no simple way to do this. The most pragmatic solution is to comment out or rename your test:

@implementation MyTestCase

- (void)testSomething { /* ... */ }

// Option 1: Comment out the test.
// - (void)testSomething { /* ... */ }

// Option 2: Rename the test such that XCTest does not consider 
// it a valid test method. In order to be "valid", it needs to:
// 
// - Have a return type of `void`
// - Take no parameters
// - Begin with "test"
//
// Here, we rename the test so that it does not begin with "test".
- (void)PENDING_testSomething { /* ... */ }

@end

Of course, one of the nice things about RSpec is that it prints out a warning of some kind. You could add these yourself using #warning:

#pragma Pending!
- (void)PENDING_testSomething { /* ... */ }

This displays a warning in Xcode. Keep in mind that #warning is only available in Objective-C, not Swift.

Testing frameworks like Quick and Specta provide pending examples:

pending("tests something") { /* ... */ }
xit("tests something") { /* ... */ }
xdescribe("describes something") { /* ... */ }
xcontext("provides context for something") { /* ... */ }

These test frameworks prevent "pending" tests from being run by overriding -[XCTestCase testInvocations]. Doing so is a lot of work, but if you wanted to implement "pending tests" yourself, you could look into doing so as well.