This page explains incompatible changes between successive versions and provides suggestions on how to deal with them.

1.0

Specs, Spec base classes and third-party extensions may have be recompiled in order to work with Spock 1.0.

JRE 1.5 and Groovy versions below 2.0 are no longer supported.

Make sure to pick the right binaries for your Groovy version of choice: groovy-2.0 for Groovy 2.0/2.1/2.2, groovy-2.3 for Groovy 2.3, and groovy-2.4 for Groovy 2.4 and higher. Spock won’t let you run with a "wrong" version.

No known source incompatible changes.

0.7

Client code must be recompiled in order to work with Spock 0.7. This includes third-party Spock extensions and base classes.

No known source incompatible changes.

0.6

Class initialization order

Note
 This only affects cases where one specification class inherits from another one.

Given these specifications:

class Base extends Specification {
    def base1 = "base1"
    def base2

    def setup() { base2 = "base2" }
}

class Derived extends Base {
    def derived1 = "derived1"
    def derived2

    def setup() { derived2 = "derived2" }
}

In 0.5, above assignments happened in the order base1, base2, derived1, derived2. In other words, field initializers were executed right before the setup method in the same class. In 0.6, assignments happen in the order base1, derived1, base2, derived2. This is a more conventional order that solves a few problems that users faced with the previous behavior, and also allows us to support JUnit’s new TestRule. As a result of this change, the following will no longer work:

class Base extends Specification {
    def base

    def setup() { base = "base" }
}

class Derived extends Base {
    def derived = base + "derived" // base is not yet set
}

To overcome this problem, you can either use a field initializer for base, or move the assignment of derived into a setup method.

@Unroll naming pattern syntax

Note
 This is not a change from 0.5, but a change compared to 0.6-SNAPSHOT.
Note
 This only affects the Groovy 1.8 and 2.0 variants.

In 0.5, the naming pattern was string based:

@Unroll("maximum of #a and #b is #c")
def "maximum of two numbers"() {
    expect:
    Math.max(a, b) == c

    where:
    a | b | c
    1 | 2 | 2
}

In 0.6-SNAPSHOT, this was changed to a closure returning a GString:

@Unroll({"maximum of $a and $b is $c"})
def "maximum of two numbers"() { ... }

For various reasons, the new syntax didn’t work out as we had hoped, and eventually we decided to go back to the string based syntax. See Improved @Unroll for recent improvements to that syntax.

Hamcrest matcher syntax

Note
 This only affects users moving from the Groovy 1.7 to the 1.8 or 2.0 variant.

Spock offers a very neat syntax for using Hamcrest matchers:

import static spock.util.matcher.HamcrestMatchers.closeTo

...

expect:
answer closeTo(42, 0.001)

Due to changes made between Groovy 1.7 and 1.8, this syntax no longer works in as many cases as it did before. For example, the following will no longer work:

expect:
object.getAnswer() closeTo(42, 0.001)

To avoid such problems, use HamcrestSupport.that:

import static spock.util.matcher.HamcrestSupport.that

...

expect:
that answer, closeTo(42, 0.001)

A future version of Spock will likely remove the former syntax and strengthen the latter one.