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Posts Tagged ‘tdd’

September 15th, 2009

What should break the test?

Posted by jeremy on September 15th, 2009

I recently came across FakeFS, which sounds like a great idea for helping to test file functions. However, I did pick up on the following off the website:

[...] it means replacing our mkdir call with a call to mkdir_p won’t break our tests. Because, really, it shouldn’t.

Now I understand that in the context of the example given, mkdir and mkdir_p should do the same thing. But mkdir and mkdir_p do perform different operations, and the tests should break if mkdir_p is changed to mkdir. If you change mkdir_p to mkdir and your passing tests don’t fail then your tests aren’t correct.

 
Tags: ruby, tdd
Posted in: Development
No Comments
 
September 11th, 2009

Squirrel and the custom nut matcher

Posted by jeremy on September 11th, 2009

I recently found squirrel, and I wanted to use it for a project we’re working on to simplify some complex finder statements. Squirrel allows turning something like this:

Task.find(:all,
  :conditions => [
    'active = ? and (updated_at > cache_version or cache_version IS NULL)', true
  ]
)

into:

Task.find(:all) do
  active == true
  any do
    updated_at > cache_version
    cache_version.nil?
  end
end

The problem is testing

Then I ran into a serious problem – how to test this piece of code using rspec? Here was my first attempt: more »

 
Tags: rails, rspec, ruby, tdd
Posted in: Development, Ruby on Rails
2 Comments
 
June 22nd, 2009

Writing tests/specs for existing code

Posted by jeremy on June 22nd, 2009

On several occasions we’ve looked at Rails projects with no tests, or very low test coverage. Trying to write tests when you didn’t write the original methods is difficult. Here are some tips that we’ve found useful.

Use your favourite framework.

If there is a large body of existing tests using a particular framework, write your new tests in that framework. If there are few or no tests then strip out anything already there and replace it with your preferred framework. At Boost we’ve decided to use RSpec for all our projects. Your objective here is to write tests, not to learn a new way of writing tests. more »

 
Tags: rspec, ruby, tdd, testing
Posted in: Ruby on Rails
No Comments
 
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