The reason we had for using == rather than .equals is that they are objects of the same kind that are functionally equal. Eventhough the .equals is currently undefined (and I think that means that Java uses an == comparison), it could be implemented in the future. As all of the body of the objects will probably be the same then, we want to verify that the setter worked and therefore chose to do a == comparison instead. We were unaware of the existence of assertSame, but we will use that instead.