Peter Marklund's Home

Over the last couple of years testing has been a controversial topic in Rails. In the beginning though Rails was of course opinionated and gave us model and controller tests along with fixtures for testing our apps. Then integration tests were added by Jamis. Some started using browser testing with tools such as Selenium and Watir. Then the whole RSpec movement swept in with a new terminology, a heavier use of mocking and stubbing, and more isolated testing of the different layers of the MVC stack. One of the most important trends right now seems to be to do "Outside In TDD" with Cucumber and webrat. There are alternatives to RSpec like Shoulda and a move towards simpler tools such as Jeremmy Mcannalys Context and Matchy libraries. There are a number of Factory libraries for replacing fixtures. Maybe the most important controversy over the years has been on whether the database should be stubbed out or not. One of the most common arguments for stubbing out the database is to keep the test execution time low.

Personally I've always been a stubbing sceptic. Given all the changes in the testing landscape it's interesting to read that at Thoughtworks there is a movement away from stubbing and back to where it all started:

"As the teams became familiar with using method stubbing, they used it more and more - falling into the inevitable over-usage where unit tests would stub out every method other than the one being tested. The problem here, as often with using doubles, is brittle tests. As you change the behavior of the application, you also have to change lots of doubles that are mimicking the old behavior. This over-usage has led both teams to move away from stubbed unit tests and to use more rails-style functional tests with direct database access."