Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Ruby on Rails Testing Resources

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When taking the plunge into Ruby on Rails it’s really easy to get carried away with learning all about the framework. It’s easy to learn the fundamentals and later realize the Rails community is a community of testers. It’s a strange world when you set out to learn about testing, TDD (test-driven development), BDD (behavior-driven development) and other acronyms and phrases relating to testing Ruby on Rails applications.

I decided to put together a short list of helpful resources to get started. If you have suggestions that would be useful to be added to this list, please add a comment or email me directly and I’ll update this post.

Books

  • Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec – this is a great, hands-on, roll-up your sleeves and get-to-work book. If you want to use RSpec on a daily basis, this book gives great advice on how to use RSpec in your day-to-day routine. It’s kept up-to-date with latest RSpec too.
  • Rails 5 Test Prescriptions – I use this book as a reference I often go to. It’s been updated to from previous versions to now Rails 5 and is a great tool to have on the shelf.
  • Effective Testing with RSpec 3 – if you decide you’d rather start without worrying about all the details around Rails you can start with learning RSpec with plain Ruby and help yourself. I’ve been through this one cover-to-cover and it’s a great tutorial.
  • The Minitest Cookbook – if you decide RSpec isn’t for you, this is probably the ultimate resource for Minitest. Well-written and kept up-to-date.

Podcasts

You can’t really learn testing from a podcast but you can learn how others approach the craft. The first is a podcast dedicated to testing Ruby applications. The rest is a list of a few episodes of podcasts that discussed testing.

I’ve been listening to The Ruby Testing Podcast and picked up some nice tidbits so far.

Training

I love Pluralsight.

Xavier Shay has long been involved in the Ruby community and well-known for discussions around testing. One of his best blog posts explains his approach to testing.

I’ve taken several courses on Udemy and they are one of my favorite places for training. The prices are low and there are many courses, so you have to do a bit of work to see which course is right for you but well worth the effort.

Maybe You Are Doing Too Much Test Driven Development

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I came across this StackOverflow post from 2008 where someone wanted to know when a developer can do too much testing. ?Simply brilliant summary by the father of test-driven development (TDD), Kent Beck:

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it. I do tend to make sense of test errors, so I’m extra careful when I have logic with complicated conditionals. When coding on a team, I modify my strategy to carefully test code that we, collectively, tend to get wrong.

Different people will have different testing strategies based on this philosophy, but that seems reasonable to me given the immature state of understanding of how tests can best fit into the inner loop of coding. Ten or twenty years from now we’ll likely have a more universal theory of which tests to write, which tests not to write, and how to tell the difference. In the meantime, experimentation seems in order.

I always find interesting to read so many blog posts about how to do TDD, including unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, factories, mocking and on and on. ?There are conferences dedicated to software quality and software craftsmanship where TDD is advocated as all-in and anything less is not doing the right thing.

Clients pay me to write code too and not tests. ?I write tests just enough to know the critical pieces of my system are working?.and continue to work. ?Developers could easily spend double their time writing completely tested systems and I’m not sure the customer gets 2X the value or ROI.

I think experimentation is certainly in order and see what best fits your situation. ?The biggest takeaway, step back and decide for yourself what’s the right amount of testing and don’t simply follow the pied pipers of TDD. ? Lots of great feedback from the others in response to the original question in that thread and great food for thought.

UPDATE: If you want to hear another developer’s perspective on TDD and using it as-needed, Marco Arment discusses how he uses testing in his very successful business on the latest Build and Analyze. ?Very timely to my post.