Should it be assertEquals(expected, actual) or assertEquals(actual, expected)?
This discussion came about because at the Chicago Code Camp, Jim Suchy from 8th light was demonstrating TDD in JavaScript by building a simple unit testing library. One of the methods he created was the typical assertEquals. In the code on github he had a signature of assertEquals(expected, actual) while during the demo he swapped the order, and I pointed out that the original was what I would have anticipated. He commented that there was an interesting discussion about it at his office a few days before. I’m interested to hear more about it, and I tweeted that I was inclined to get a debate going about it just to see what the different rationales were. This post is a collation of thoughts and opinions to date.
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