What is a good way to do a light unit-testing in an Rails web application?

Question

I am on a tight timeline with minimum resources for a project.

I would like to practice test driven development for this project, but realistically, i would not have time to learn any of the more sophisticated frameworks like Cucumber, Rspec, etc. And it would probably be counter-productive at this point anyway

What do you recommend is the minimum I do?

What web framework are you using? – Dave Aug 21 '10 at 04:29 — Dave, Aug 21 '10 at 04:29
sorry, added in more detail. Rails – meow Aug 21 '10 at 04:48 — meow, Aug 21 '10 at 04:48

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 21 '10 at 07:49

If you are very short on time, your best bet would be to read through the rails guide on testing. It equips you to get started quickly with Test:Unit.

Then you could write unit tests for the (model) methods that you care most about - things most critical to your app.

Optional suggestion - Rails testing is a landscape full of controversies and debates. If you want to save time, get started with (any) one thing (Test:Unit/shoulda/rspec...fixture/factory ..etc) and leave the discussions for leisure.

Start with Test::Unit. Any project has enough timeline for at least some model tests, they help you write the model code! :) — Andrew Atkinson, Aug 22 '10 at 04:24

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 21 '10 at 05:02

1

You might want to give Shoulda a try.

answered Aug 21 '10 at 05:02

Mike Buckbee

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 21 '10 at 05:21

1

Test Unit is baked into rails and is pretty easy to use if you have any background with unit testing.

answered Aug 21 '10 at 05:21

Toby Hede

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What is a good way to do a light unit-testing in an Rails web application?

3 Answers3