[LRUG] TDD (was: Ruby Contracting)

[Francisco Trindade (Frank)]

> frameworks like Rails are targeted squarely at the "application writer" and
> not the "test writer"

I dont necessarily agree with that statement. I believe writing tests
in Ruby/Rails is easier than in other languages like Java/.Net.
Apart from being a dynamic language, what makes the tests "setup" much
simpler, Rails comes off-the-shelf with a test environment, and tools
like RsPec are probably the currently best that you can get for unit
testing in software development.

And that's not even considering acceptance tests, where the ruby
community has available tools like Cucumber and Webrat, which can make
your test environment much better than it could be in any other
language.

I've recently finished a 6 month Rails project where we used RsPec +
Cucumber (with Webrat) + Selenium where we did testing much better
than anyone on the  team had previously done in any other environment,
and we practically didn't have any bug found by the client. So I don't
see Rails to be more difficult to test than any other language, unless
I'm missing something

Cheers,
Francisco

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Tom Stuart <tom at experthuman.com> wrote:
> On 19 Feb 2009, at 10:51, Francisco Trindade (Frank) wrote:
>>
>> Tests are code, and are so difficult to write or maintain as development
>> code.
>
> This is a seductive and commonly repeated idea but is demonstrably untrue
> for things like Rails applications, particularly in the sense that
> frameworks like Rails are targeted squarely at the "application writer" and
> not the "test writer" -- one could make a fairly persuasive argument that
> Rails is an incomplete framework until writing and maintaining tests for a
> Rails app really is the same difficulty as writing and maintaing the Rails
> app itself. We're not there yet.
>
> I know we're not talking about Rails (or any other framework) here, but it's
> definitely true that writing tests that interact with other people's code is
> harder than writing your own code, and no sizable Ruby application is an
> island.
>
> Cheers,
> -Tom
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-- 
--
Francisco Trindade