Readable tests

I mentioned readable tests yesterday and I have found following text in book Clean Code today.

What makes a clean test? Three things. Readability, readability, and readability. Readability is perhaps even more important in unit tests than it is in production code. What makes tests readable? The same thing that makes all code readable: clarity, simplicity, and density of expression. In a test you want to say a lot with as few expressions as possible.

Thinking about it I am not sure how I acquired this knowledge. Whether it was from some book or article or I just realized it after seeing a lot of bad tests (and writing them too). Indeed, it happened many times that I found much easier to understand production code and then I was not able to decipher tests to see how to modify them (or how to add new test). Or to find why test is failing.

Many times it seems that people care much less about the tests. It would be interesting to know whether they do not care or do not believe they are worth of effort or they just do not know how to do them better. I suspect the last possibility is culprit most of the times. Fortunately this is the easiest to fix. It just needs learning...