Alex Miller - Unit tests are a drop cloth

Test-Driven Development (TDD) in its most dogmatic form (red-green-refactor in micro-iterations) can be tedious. It does not have to be this way! This guide shows a pragmatic approach with integration and unit tests, that works in practice and imp...

We had a conversation about the fact that the 'TDD is about testing vs TDD is about design" debate that keeps popping up, especially now in the Ruby community.

To run a single test file:

rake test:units TEST=test/unit/post_test.rb
rake test:functionals TEST=test/functional/posts_controller_test.rb
rake test:integration TEST=test/integration/admin_news_posts_test.rb

You may even run a single...

We are maintaining some vintage projects with tests written in Test::Unit instead of RSpec. Mocks and stubs are not features of Test::Unit, but you can use the Mocha gem to add those facilities.

The following is a q...

Seems like there's no way to do it in Capybara, unfortunately. But if you're running your tests with the Selenium driver (and probably other drivers that support JavaScript), you can hack it

Download buttons can be difficult to test, especially with Selenium. Depending on browser, user settings and response headers, one of three things can happen:

• The browser shows a "Save as..." dialog. Since it is a modal dialog, we can no longer...

Slow test suites are a major pain point in projects, often due to RSpec and FactoryBot. Although minitest and fixtures are sometimes viewed as outdated, they can greatly improve test speed.

We adopted a project using minitest and fixtures, ...

You can use mail-tester.com to check your application's e-mails for issues that might cause e-mails to be classified as spam.

They provide a one-time e-mail addresses that you can use to sign up etc. You can then c...

Checking if a JavaScript value is of a given type can be very confusing:

• There are two operators typeof and instanceof which work very differently.
• JavaScript has some primitive types, like string literals, that are not objects (as oppose...

Eventually you’ll forget that you used to spend hours testing your code in a browser, and start complaining that your automated tests are taking minutes to run! You’ll have intense debates with co-workers about what to test and how to test it prop...