I have a side-project where I use tape for testing. A few days ago I stumbled on a test that I thought should fail, but passed.

The issue was what some people call “interacting” tests. The state of the world of that test was being influenced by the ones before it. I think it’s because I’m used to the Mocha/Jasmine style of test suite organization, and I assumed that the tests I had at the same level of nesting are independent.

I had one more similar issue before and I looked for a way to get different setup and teardown for different branches of the test suite. I’m not the first think about this, and found a discussion in a GitHub issue. I found the proposed workarounds inelegant and I rejected them because I want my tests to be clear and explicit.

So I decided to switch to Mocha. It has a test suite organization similar to Jasmine and rspec. Switching testing frameworks is not a trivial task but I think that long term it’s good to have a robust one.