Giving names to unit tests

Hello people! Just wanted to bring a discussion to the community that happened on my team.

When it comes to testing, naming the tests is itself an art. There are several approaches and all of them and none of them are right/wrong. I’ve seen several patterns through the community and some others on my team because of the different backgrounds each have on the subject. I’d like to know your opinions about it.

Different styles

Here is some styles I’ve seen:

• The AAA approach (arrange - act - assert): gives names like test "given a proper user when it authenticates it receives a proper session"
• The “it does some result” approach: test "it authenticates properly"
• The “it capabilities” approach: test "it can authenticate an active user"
• The “result verb” approach: test "succeeds authentication with an active user"
• The “action” approach: test "authenticates an active user"

So on …

Describe and trace option

What gives me some anxiety is the way the sentence ends up when we use “describe” and the “–trace” option.

The pattern ExUnit uses is: "test #{describe_text} #{test_text}". So the end result could be something like:

“test some_function/1 it authenticates properly”

This is strange to read. But to make it more plausible we would have to add a strange clause to desribce like describe "that some_function/1" do ... end. So on the report it would be:

“test that some_function/1 succeeds with an active user”

We could use a different approach and use the action directly:

“test some_function/1 can authenticate an active user”

What are your thoughts on good unit testing naming? Sorry for English mistakes. Altough I am picking on the grammar here, English is not my mother’s tongue.