Peter Marklund's Home

I'm in a Rails team with mixed opinions on whether to use fixtures. Therefore we have everything from RSpec specifications that use a lot of mocking/stubbing and don't touch the database, to specifications that set up their own databse data through helper methods and the specifications that I write that rely mostly on fixture data. What I have found is that when you don't use global fixtures (a setting in your test_helper.rb or spec_helper.rb file) you can run into situations where seemingly unrelated specifications/tests fail, and fail in different ways depending on if you run them in separation, through autotest, or with rake. What is going on is test data spillover/interference between tests. This can lead to very long and frustrating debugging sessions indeed. The best way to avoid this seems to be to turn on global fixtures. This will probably increase the specification run time, an issue that I partially adress by keeping the number of records in my fixture files to a minimum. Also, I prioritize test coverage and convenient access to a common set of test data over making my specifications run faster.