Testing

Ruby on Rails provides extensive integrated support for testing: unit tests for models, functional tests for controllers, and integration tests for sequences of actions. Many developers in the Rails community are advocates of test-driven or behavior-driven development; a variety of tools, such as rSpec, support these approaches. Browser-based acceptance tests are supported with other tools, such as Selenium.

File Upload Form Testing Fixtures

Recently, I needed to write my first set of functional tests for a form that is used to upload image assets into our Content Management System. I wanted to find something as easy as fixtures for testing this part of our program. continue...

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Be Dee Dee and Me
PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath

Nice general overview of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), the tools available (test/spec, rSpec), and then an introduction to actually using test/spec within your code.
rcov Rake Task
Mike Clark
Real world Rails, Part 4: Testing strategies in Ruby on Rails
Selenium on Rails
Code Between Lines: A RSpec matcher for ActiveRecord validation
Rodrigo Kochenburger

Handy matchers to make checking for Active Record errors in specs even easier.
Cookin' with Ruby on Rails - Integration Tests
Bill Walton

Tutorial on writing Integration Tests using Rails 1.2.6 (though still useful for Rails 2).
15 TDD steps to create a Rails application
Andrzej Krzywda

A simple tutorial that gives the flavor of using Test Driven Development in a basic Rails application.
Introduction to Test Driven Design (TDD)

An essay that explains what Test Driven Development is, how it works, and various myths and misunderstandings about TDD.
autotest-rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach

Autotest runs continuously and watches for files to change (when you save). It then runs any associated tests automatically.
Autotest with verbose flag on
Mike Subelsky

Hints on how to configure ZenTest’s autotest to be less verbose on various messages and other configuration suggestions.
RailsConf Live Notes: Testing Tutorial

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Documentation (106)
- Bleak House
  Memory leak detection
- the fabulous spider fuzz plugin
  SpiderTest is an automated integration-testing script that iterates over every page in your application.
- RailsLodge - Rathole plugin
  Rathole is a fixtures oriented Ruby on Rails plugin that makes working with foreign key relationships much easier. It also removes the need for separate join table fixture files. Rathole is available for Rails 1.2.x and is now part of the official Rails 2.x distribution.
- APIdoc
  Rails Doc morphed into APIdock. Collects various versions of Rails, Ruby, and Rspec documentation into one place.
- test/spec Official Documentation
  test/spec layers an RSpec-inspired interface on top of Test::Unit, so you can mix TDD and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development).
- test/spec RubyForge Home Page
  Official RubyForge home page for project.
- Watir - Overview
  Watir is a simple open-source library for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and easy to maintain. It is optimized for simplicity and flexibility.
- RSpec Homepage
  RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby. It provides two frameworks for writing and executing examples of how your Ruby application should behave: a Story Framework for describing behaviour at the application level; and a Spec Framework for describing behaviour at the object level.
- test/spec, a BDD interface for Test::Unit
  test/spec layers an RSpec-inspired interface on top of Test::Unit, so you can mix TDD and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development).
- Rails Cache Test Plugin
  The cache test plugin adds assertions to Test::Units::TestCase to check for cached and expired pages, actions and fragments in your tests.
Events (13)
- Test-Driven Development with Rails
  Three-day seminar in Columbus, OH on using test-driven development for Rails applications.
Screencasts (136)
Software (171)
- tarantula
  Ruby on Rails plugin that crawls your site, exercising all the URLs and checking things as it crawls along.
- eigenclass - rcov: code coverage for Ruby
- ZenTest: Automated test scaffolding for Ruby
  The ZenTest collection includes a full test coverage suite of tools (including the extremely useful autotest).
- CruiseControl.rb
  Open-source continuous integration software for Ruby applications.
- Selenium on Rails
  Plugin that simplifies the use of Selenium for testing Rails applications.
- Opera Dragonfly
  Browser Debugging tool (like Firebug), but runs on any device that Opera runs on.
- Firebug - Web Development Evolved
  Comprehensive debugging and in-browser development tool for Firefox.
- Mocha
  Official Mocha Readme
- Flex Mock
  FlexMock is a simple, but flexible, mock object library for Ruby unit testing that integrates easily with Test::Unit.
Presentation Slides (12)
- Full-stack webapp testing with Selenium and Rails

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Testing

File Upload Form Testing Fixtures

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