As I supposed, I was missing something obvious !
instead of giving the function reference fn , I was giving function calling fn() !
this is the successful code
var expect = require("chai").expect;
describe("Testing", function(){
var fn = function(){ throw new Error("hello"); };
//map testing
describe("map", function(){
it("should return error",function(){
expect(fn).to.throw("hello");
});
});
});