Structural Equality for Better Tests

Probably worth mentioning that we sometimes need a normalisation step. The most common example is comparing two lists for equality, when their order doesn&#x27;t actually matter; this can produce false-positives if some later refactor changes the order of the elements. In this case we can normalise the values by sorting them before comparing.<p>One example I keep hitting is a widely used JSON library for Haskell, whose test suite checks a pair of values for equality, when they just-so-happen to be in the opposite order on 32bit x86. Since I do lots of dependency pinning, this same bug keeps cropping up in different contexts :(

I write all my tests by first extracting aspects of the compared items to values that are then compared structurally. Nothing else makes sense.

very easy is to serialize both objects and compare binary data.