Does anyone know of a public example of a Rails application that does testing in the way that DHH says is good?
I'm tired of the talk talk talk talk talk talk of "proper" testing in Rails, yet the examples always seem to be hidden away behind company firewalls. I've only seen a couple Rails apps with Rails-Way test suites, and they were nightmares that took many minutes to run. But I have seen dozens of Rails apps written by opinionated Rails devs with strong views about what proper testing was... and the apps had no tests at all.
If your tests take 10 seconds, how much did you really test?
The point it sounds like he's trying to make is that if you say things like "they were nightmares that too many minutes to run" you may be approaching testing from the wrong point of view. He sounds like he wants to say "let the tests take 5 minutes" and I agree with him, thats what CI is for. Commit your code, mark the issue your fixing, let CI tell you if its done or not, take your pomodoro break, coffee break, etc, then sit back down, and pick back up with your test results on the CI server and repeat the cycle, a 5 minute test suite is NOT A BAD THING...
If you think 5 minutes is terribly long spare a thought for us deployment engineers... my test suite involves building and tearing down entire VM's or PXE booted machines and depending on what software is being built and tested through deployment can take an hour or more.
> If your tests take 10 seconds, how much did you really test?
I see your point, but time-to-test is a horrible proxy for quality of tests. Business logic isolated from external systems can run incredibly fast, so ten seconds worth of testing can mean an awful lot in that case. The nature of TDD basically demands that you structure your code that way to remain productive. Otherwise it's like using a text editor that takes five minutes every time you try to save a file.
That's my inherent frustration with this argument. Both sides aren't arguing for their methodologies, they're arguing against the byproducts of each others methodologies.
Excluding the acceptance tests (written with capybara and spinach) the test suite for my current client takes less than three seconds on my machine, including the run time (excluding the phantomjs boot time) of the suite of ui-exercising JavaScript tests, and they are nearly comprehensive, testing every component contract from the client to the backend. The ATs run in a little under a minute, covering the major integration points. There is very little mocking in any of the suite, and no direct database access.
Testing hurts when you do it poorly or naively. I know because I've done it both ways, and when I find something harder than it ought to be I invariably find some point of coupling beneath the surface. When my design is good, my tests are fast and easy. If you listen to DHH you're going to have problems testing. Not because you have to when writing software, but because he's already made decisions for you which are bad or highly coupled. Don't fall for the straw man. There are better ways to do it.
I'm tired of the talk talk talk talk talk talk of "proper" testing in Rails, yet the examples always seem to be hidden away behind company firewalls. I've only seen a couple Rails apps with Rails-Way test suites, and they were nightmares that took many minutes to run. But I have seen dozens of Rails apps written by opinionated Rails devs with strong views about what proper testing was... and the apps had no tests at all.