I think we see eye to eye here. The sort of "one level up" thing is what initially attracted me to spec testing because that seemed to not only give you tools for performing your tests, but also helped direct you towards what would be useful to test: the behaviors of the code that you actually care about. So when I use spec testing tools, I tend not to think about making sure that the low level function traverses the directories in a particular way, but rather that all of the directories have been renamed (for example).