Allow to skip tests programmatically

🚀 Feature Proposal

Mocha supports skipping tests programmatically (in both before and it) as:

describe("Some test" () => {
  it("Should skip", function () {
    if (true) {
      this.skip(); // test marked as skipped, no further part run
    }
    notInvoked();
  });
}):

Motivation

It’s very useful for cases where during tests setup we find out whether test can be pursued or not e.g. we need some external data, but due to some unavailability we can’t so we decide to skip tests.

Is this somewhere on a roadmap?

[medikoo]

Skipping programmatically, and only running a portion of your test suite as a result, doesn’t seem like it’s serving the purpose of tests. A test failure at that point would be beneficial so the problem(s) could be fixed

It serves integration tests. Where tests depend on some external factors, and unavailability of some external resource, shouldn’t indicate a problem with a project (reported with fail) but fact that test cannot be pursued (hence skipped)

[palmerj3]

This seems like a bad idea to me. Currently you can do it.skip() to explicitly skip a particular test and it’s not even executed.

Skipping programmatically, and only running a portion of your test suite as a result, doesn’t seem like it’s serving the purpose of tests. A test failure at that point would be beneficial so the problem(s) could be fixed. And if they can’t be fixed then marking a test as skipped explicitly like I’ve showed above is an appropriate reaction.