Writing your own assertions is a way to reduce duplication in tests. The error message also needs to be informative. Approval testing is a different way to achieve that but we don’t go into that here.
Look at these failure messages. What do you expect to see in a good failure message?
If you’ve used a custom assertion in a previous exercise, review that code now. Otherwise, show an example of a custom assertion for an exercise they are already familiar with.
Roadload has a starting position with one test case with several assertions. Extract it to a custom assert in a test fixture. Write some more tests using the same custom assert.
When should you write a custom assertion? What kinds of code smells would indicate it is a good idea?
Compare your answers with the list in XUnit patterns