But now imagine you’ve got thousands of test cases to organize. The first level of organization is provided by test functions such as test-+ and test-* that directly call check. But with thousands of test cases, you’ll likely need other levels of organization. Functions such as test-arithmetic can group related test functions into test suites. Now suppose some low-level test functions are called from multiple test suites. It’s not unheard of for a test case to pass in one context but fail in another. If that happens, you’ll probably want to know more than just what low-level test function contains the test case.

If you define the test suite functions such as with deftest and make a small change to the *test-name* bookkeeping, you can have results reported with a “fully qualified” path to the test case, something like this:

(let ((*test-name* ',name))

to the following:

Since **APPEND** returns a new list made up of the elements of its arguments, this version will bind *test-name* to a list containing the old contents of *test-name* with the new name tacked onto the end.7 When each test function returns, the old value of *test-name* will be restored.

  (combine-results
   (test-*)))

The results now show exactly how you got to each test expression.

As your test suite grows, you can add new layers of test functions; as long as they’re defined with deftest, the results will be reported correctly. For instance, the following: