Testing in Rails: What's Now, What's New, and What's Missing

The last year has seen a proliferation of tools and frameworks for testing in Rails, followed by a wave of work allowing developers to use one framework’s syntax in another tool, such as Jeremy MacAnally’s work on Context and Matchy, the Remarkable gem that allows shoulda macros in RSpec and the various factory tools that have adopted each other’s syntax.

The situation has become increasingly complex, which is good in that tools now exist to match anybody’s test preferences, but bad in that it’s increasingly hard for novice testers to pick a tool, or even to get inspiration from seeing well tested code.

The goals for this session include:

• A discussion of what new tools are worth using and which just add to the confusion. Advocacy for favorite tools is definitely encouraged.

• For experienced testers, how have you changed your test practices based on new tools. What tools would you encourage novice testers to adopt?

• A discussion of what’s missing, both in terms of holes in the existing tool set overall, and in features you’d like to see added to existing tools.