Test spies are a form of test double that preserves the normal four-phase unit

Routing error in Rails 3.2.22.1 can appear when concerns is passed as an option to resources, producing broken routes and failed controller specs.

Bundler does not auto-require gems, so specs may miss dependencies unless the environment calls Bundler.require; direct dependencies still must be required by the gem itself.

patiently do repeats a block until it passes or times out; reusing outer variable names inside the repeated block can make repeated evaluations fail.

Named Machinist blueprints can reuse another blueprint’s fields, letting variants combine shared defaults without repeating attribute definitions.

RSpec stubs for methods that yield blocks need and_yield instead of and_return; multiple yields can be chained, and return values can be combined.

Passing long text blocks to Cucumber steps keeps feature files readable while preserving full Markdown content for step definitions.

sslscan reports TLS/SSL cipher support and certificate details for remote hosts, helping identify weak protocols, preferred ciphers, and certificate validity.

Reusable Gherkin steps can be chained inside a new step definition with steps or step, but steps only processes lines starting with Gherkin keywords.

When submitting textareas, browsers sometimes include carriage returns (\r) instead of just line feeds (\n) at the end of each line. I don't know when this happens, and most of the time it doesn't matter.

In cases where it does matter, use the attached trait to remove carriage returns from one or more attributes like this:

class Note
  does 'strip_carriage_returns', :prose, :code
end

Here is the test that goes with it:

describe Note do

  describe 'before_validation' do...

Updating WebMock to 1.8.0 can let unstubbed specs send real HTTP requests when Curb is older than 0.7.16.

Capybara can lose the HTTPS state when specs cross between secure and insecure Rails actions, causing request URLs to fall back to the wrong protocol.

validates_acceptance_of silently skips nil attributes, so a missing checkbox or typo can leave acceptance unchecked; a boolean field with validates_presence_of is safer.

RSpec can freeze without output and ignore --backtrace or Ctrl-C; sending USR1 can print all thread backtraces from a running Ruby process.

Manual queue processing in Resque specs avoids relying on an external worker while keeping behavior close to real job execution.

Persist ActiveRecord records directly when callbacks and validations are unnecessary; Rails 2 has create_without_callbacks and update_without_callbacks, while Rails 3 needs sneaky-save.

Measure JavaScript code duration in the browser with console.time and console.timeEnd, including asynchronous flows and separate code locations. Works in modern browsers and recent Internet Explorer.

Deprecated Time#succ warnings can flood logs when time ranges are iterated or compared with include?; cover? or SQL BETWEEN avoid the issue.

Limit Chrome CPU speed to measure frontend performance and reproduce sluggish behavior in DevTools.

Cleanup commands for leftover dump files and unneeded local MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres databases, with whitelisting and flexible authentication methods.

RSpec 3 no longer infers spec type from folder names, which can break helpers like routing in existing suites. Set type explicitly or re-enable file-location inference.

Check whether form controls or buttons are disabled in Cucumber step definitions, using label-based assertions on Capybara or Webrat elements.

Duplicate links in Capybara can trigger Ambiguous match errors when any matching link is fine; switching Capybara.match to :first avoids the failure.

Timestamp each ping reply to correlate network latency with exact times and log connectivity events more easily.