Testing Rails

Extending the Age old debate: "To Test or not to Test..." in Rails

Transcript

1. Testing Rails Extending the Debate: "To Test or not to Test..."
2. The "Revenue" of Tests • Ensure API functions correctly • Verify client functionality • Document, Decouple, and Focus code • Ease Refactoring • Reveal Edge Cases
3. Ensure API functions correctly Everything is an API • Model uses ActiveRecord API • Controller uses Model API • View uses Controller API + Helper API
4. Verify Client Functionality Tests can cover features of your product
5. Document, Decouple, and Focus Code Well written tests can function as specifications for how code should function. API should be Decoupled and Concise. Isolating the object to ensure correct performance
6. Ease Refactoring When it comes time to refactor code, testing is crucial to: • Ensure functionality is maintained • Speed up refactor process by removing manual testing of refactored code • Provide benchmarks of performance increase
7. Reveal Edge Cases Because we all know we hate doing this by hand... • What if someone doesn't enter a last name? • What if nil is returned by this query?
8. What to Test 6 defacto categories of tests for Rails. • Models • Controllers • Views • Layouts • Helpers • Integration
9. Models Tests Model API. Data integrity is a very important focus here.
10. Controllers Tests Controller flow. • Before filters • Assigning values to variables • Flash Messages • What gets rendered / returned / redirected
11. Views Tests individual views and partials. • Defines what a user needs to see • Defines where it appears in the Html (inside what div, class, id, ect)
12. Layouts Defines the Html structure. Great for guarantees between the Back end and Front end developers.
13. Helpers Helpers are an API for views to use, and should be just as isolated as models.
14. Integration The user's view of the application. This level is as close to a browser experience as technology allows. It allows for stories/workflows that test things like:
15. (So Eric doesn't hunt me down afterwards...)
16. Revenue vs Cost Should testing be needed for this project? • How big is this project? • How long do we have to create this project? • How many programmers will be working on this project? • Will this project need refactoring? • Will the specs change on this project?
17. Delegation of Effort • What percent of effort should be committed to each layer of testing? • Include/exclude Integration testing?