Summary: There are a lot of tools for testing Rails. Here are links to several of the ones mentioned in this podcast. Test Unit RSpec Cucumber Mocha Flexmock Factory Girl You can find my interview with David Heinemeier Hansson here, and my response to his comments on Twitter here. Finally, here are a few other resources for you to get started with testing Ruby on Rails. Introduction to Outside-In Development with Cucumber Here's a transcript of the podcast: Rails Coach Podcast, Episode 5 Hey, everybody, and welcome back to another Rails Coach podcast. This is Charles Max Wood and this week we’re going to go into testing Rails. You can test Rails in a lot of different ways, and we’re going to talk about some of the libraries that are around for doing that. I’m also going to talk about my approach to it; some of the things that I’m thinking about doing or changing – and I guess we should just dive right in. First off, I want to point out that there’s been a discussion on Twitter about Test Unit vs. RSpec. Now, if you’re not familiar with Ruby on Rails or who David Heinemeier Hansson is, then I recommend that you go listen to the “Teach Me To Code” podcast. I interviewed David on that podcast and talked a little bit about Ruby on Rails. And that will give you kind of a feel for who he is. He’s the guy that wrote Ruby on Rails and he is the technical partner at 37signals that makes Basecamp and Highrise and a bunch of other products that I used to use. But I don’t anymore. And that’s not the topic for this podcast. Anyway, we’re going to go into some of the things that are available for testing Ruby on Rails. I’m going to go into, first off, the discussion that was had over RSpec and Test Unit. David Heinemeier Hansson, a while back, said that he and 37signals, they used Test Unit, and that Test Unit and Mocha, which is a mocking and stubbing framework were basically all you need for good Ruby on Rails testing. Then he later said that he was a little disappointed by the proliferation of RSpec and Cucumber because he felt like they were a little too complicated and had been cargo-culted upon the Ruby on Rails community. And that started a whole lot of discussion over whether or not RSpec and Cucumber were the right tool. There were people who came out and said, Oh yeah, David’s right. Test Unit all the way. And other people came out and said, Hey wait a minute, RSpec all the way. David, you’re an idiot. And some people had kind of the reaction that I had where we thought about it for a minute and said, I’ve been using Test Unit or RSpec for a while, and I really ought to explore what the differences are and why I might want to use one over the other. I really haven’t had a chance to do that. However, I have used both; I’ve used both on different projects. And so I think it is worth discussing testing tools that are available for Ruby on Rails and what you can do to learn this stuff. So we’ll jump right in here. First off, I use – I’ll let you know – I use RSpec and Cucumber, and I use Factory Girl to generate my objects that I am going to be testing against. And then I use FlexMark for mocking and stubbing. That’s more or less what I use. Now, with Cucumber I use Capybara. And then I’ve recently started using Culerity and Celerity to test my JavaScript. And that has been working, actually, really well. So, basically I use RSpec to do some of the testing in Cucumber. For example, you can write your assertions or dot-shoulds in Cucumber steps, and if they fail then your Cucumber scenario fails. RSpec I also use for my unit tests. And unit tests are just class-level tests. They usually use some method of mocking or stubbing to isolate your object so that you can test one way or the other, or if you have a dependent object, then you don’t necessarily have to mock that out. It’s a matter of preference as to how deeply and how thoroughly you mock things out. In my case,
