Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing

Testing is an essential practice to delivering working software. We distinguish tests as unit, functional, or acceptance.

Unit tests are fine-grained, focused, and provide fast feedback. UnitRecord seamlessly disconnects ActiveRecord from the database to achieve this precision for models. Similarly, UnitController isolates Rails controllers from view rendering.

Functional tests are more collaborate and course-grained. They need data, and the Model Factory pattern removes any brittle dependency on fixtures. As test suites grow, we need to ensure they do not become slow and cumbersome to run. DeepTest provides modest parallelization so we can run our functional tests as often as our unit tests.

Testing through a browser is our only guarantee to ensure that our application actually meets acceptance criteria. Automating this process typically results in a fragile test suite that is slow, depends on a lot of data setup, and is hard to maintain. Selenium Grid, in conjunction with Model Factory and HPricot, significantly improves the design and maintainability of acceptance tests.

From unit to acceptance, this session covers the spectrum to teach effective testing of Rails applications.