Fast, Sexy, and Svelte:

Our Kind of Rails Testing

Dan Manges (ThoughtWorks)

zak (unemployed)
a translation without buzzwords
notes
short build times

maintainable

comprehensive coverage

this talk: how to achieve these three things

what this talk is not about
notes
selling you on tests

if you haven’t bought into the value of

testing, prepare to be very bored…
the testing spectrum
unit
functional
integration
denial
acceptance
what’s a unit test?
notes
  fine grained
  focused on one object
  provides the most accurate feedback
  fails fastest
  only one object / method under test per
test method
avoiding unit test brittleness
gem install unit_record
http://unit-test-ar.rubyforge.org
not hitting a database is fast
let’s look at a super simple test
we could write a fixture
fixtureless unit tests
notes
  focused tests don’t require a dataset
  fixtures are less clear
unit tests are for any class
unit tests for controllers
notes
  reduce dependency on models
  mock or stub models
  stub view rendering (UnitController)
  don’t hit the database (UnitRecord)
  don’t depend on model validations
gem install unit_controller
http://unit-controller.rubyforge.org
unit testing views

(yum)
notes
  don’t bother
  laborious
  really brittle
  viewsaren’t objects
  move view logic to presenters or helpers
unit tests the old & new way
unit tests are for models
unit tests are for any class
use fixtures for data
focused tests don’t need fixtures
hit the database
disconnected from the database
what’s a functional test?
notes
  coarser grained than unit tests
  involves more than one object
  involves several methods
  fails at an interaction level
functional tests require data
problems with fixtures
notes
  polluted sharing
  laborious to create and maintain
  creating associations
  setting attributes your test doesn’t care
about
  doesn’t run validations
model factory
notes
  factory method pattern
  creating data dynamically instead of
statically in files
  no sharing pollution
  runs validations
getting a good factory
notes
  build it yourself
  provide reasonable defaults
  fill in associations
creating a factory
functional tests are also for any class
notes
  interactions between models
  interesting database interactions
  interactions between controller and
model
  interactions between controller and
view*
interesting database interactions
interaction between controller and view*
notes
  why the asterisk?
  don’t test the content of the view*
  test that it renders successfully
  we’ll test its content in acceptance tests
functional testing speed
http://xkcd.com/303/
functional tests in serial
real time: 9 min 42.951 sec
rake task for serial tests
deepTest
deepTest for RSpec
Functional Tests in Parallel
  real
time: 6 min 30.441 sec
  33% faster
DeepTest & The Database
functional tests distributed
real time: 2 min 2.522 sec
5 times faster than serial
DeepTest
gem install deep_test
http://deep-test.rubyforge.org/
functional tests the old & new way

fixtures for data

factory for data
functional tests are for controllers
functional tests are for any class
tests are run in serial
tests are run in parallel
what about integration tests?
traditional integration tests
Integration Tests the New Way
  sometimes useful for special purpose
tests
  performance tests
  smoke tests
  tests simulating multiple users
  acceptance tests are better for this level
of granularity
what’s an acceptance test?
Selenium RC
writing acceptance tests
encapsulating a page
hide low-level details of page structure
data access
notes
  directdatabase access
  use the same factory as functional tests
  datasets
  difficult to maintain
  make tests less clear
  difficult to isolate test failures
focused acceptance tests
notes
  hack the session
  skip the login page
  skip to part way through a wizard
acceptance test parallelization
notes
  Selenium Grid
  DeepTest
  web & database cluster
test parallelization in general
 hey it's Rails.
it scales with hardware.
and so do the tests
The End
  Dan’s Blog: dcmanges.com
  Something Nimble:
somethingnimble.com
  Tools:
  deep test
  selenium grid
  unit record
  unit controller