Is Assert.Fail() considered bad practice?

Question

I use Assert.Fail a lot when doing TDD. I\'m usually working on one test at a time but when I get ideas for things I want to implement later I quickly write an empty test where

Answer 1

Wild guess: withholding Assert.Fail is intended to stop you thinking that a good way to write test code is as a huge heap of spaghetti leading to an Assert.Fail in the bad cases. [Edit to add: other people's answers broadly confirm this, but with quotations]

Since that's not what you're doing, it's possible that xUnit.Net is being over-protective.

Or maybe they just think it's so rare and so unorthogonal as to be unnecessary.

I prefer to implement a function called ThisCodeHasNotBeenWrittenYet (actually something shorter, for ease of typing). Can't communicate intention more clearly than that, and you have a precise search term.

Whether that fails, or is not implemented (to provoke a linker error), or is a macro that doesn't compile, can be changed to suit your current preference. For instance when you want to run something that is finished, you want a fail. When you're sitting down to get rid of them all, you may want a compile error.