This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: Hooked on Testing Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

I am now officially completely hooked on testing! The last few weeks proved to me how empowering tests can be. And not just for sleeping good at night, it has some other advantages that make every minute spent on testing worth the time.

When Rails 1.2 was released, I wanted to switch over a few of my applications. The ones that have a full test suite where a no brainer. Switch rails version (I keep it on my own repository), run tests, fix what's broken, and off we go! Even the small apps had some issues with the migration - some small changes that needed to be done. With the tests it's easy. But some other old apps that didn't have full testing - I just decided to wait a bit. It will require too much manual labor to make sure everything is in place. I had a similar experience with switching plugin versions.

Now every change I need to do, I can easily verify that it will work. No need for guessing or manual testing (which isn't reliable enough). This is a huge improvement from what I was used to in past, especially in my C++ development days, where testing was always external to the application, and it's so much better!

Regarding TDD (Test Driven Development) - I think it's amazingly well suited for functional testing, and even more so for integration testing. For models I still prefer to model the structure first and then test, especially for complex data models. It is still more natural for me to think of the structure. Maybe it's something I will change with time as well.

My next goal in testing is getting Selenium going and doing with it acceptance and integration testing.

A really good book all around, but on tests it really shines, is Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce. They practice TDD from the first step of development, and really make the process clear. I highly recommend it even if you don't need an introduction to Rails or learn e-commerce. It's worth the money just to learn testing and TDD. They even have a chapter devoted to Selenium. It's now the third book I recommend for Rails developers: Programming Ruby, AWDR and Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce.