A quick search shows that JUnit 4 has something: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/156503/how-do-you-assert-that-a-certain-exception-is-thrown-in-junit-4-tests

This comment was originally written by @zoechi

isn't that what throwsA is about?

expect(() => throw 'some exception', throwsA(new isInstanceOf<String>()));

(there is also throws but I failed earlier this day in understanding how to use it and therefore sticked with throwsA which fits perfectly but I didn't care what type is actually thrown)

After looking into more, it's not exactly throwsA, it's "I expect this test to fail".

Bob knows more about the use case.

cc @munificent.

+1

The concept is the same as the status files in Dart's repo: In your project, a user reports a bug. You wish to track the bug and add a test case for it immediately, but until you've written a fix, you wish to mark the test as failing. This should be 2 new methods:

* failing_test(String spec, TestFunction body)

• failing_group(String description, void body())

(akin to the other oddly underscored skip_test, solo_test skip_group, solo_group)

Running the unit tests would run all tests defined with failing_test, and would anticipate them to fail. I think this would then yield a final output of something like:

PASS: Something here
PASS: Something else here
ANTICIPATED FAIL: Some not-yet-fixed bug

2 tests passed. 1 test anticipated to fail indeed failed.

It's important to run the test: if at some point the test starts to succeed, the developer surely wants to know this, and investigate! Thus:

PASS: Something here
PASS: Something else here
UNANTICIPATED PASS: Some not-yet-fixed bug

2 PASSED, 1 UNANTICIPATED PASS, 0 FAILED, 0 ERRORS

I think this helps with Seth's use case: If I want to use package foo, I could (in the future) look at the test results on pub.dartlang, see "100 tests pass, 3 anticipated failures" and imagine that these are related to open bugs.

I'm happy to implement this.

cc @nicolasgarnier.

This issue has been moved to dart-lang/test#254.