Okay I’m bored of this. I need to talk about it. I love to use Ruby, RSpec, Cucumber and Rails to do test-driven development, but my tools for running tests are just infuriatingly dumb. Here’s what I want: When a test fails, it should be kept on a list until it has been seen to …
Tag Archives: TDD
Outside-In vs Inside Out – Comparing TDD Approaches
At last month’s ScotRUG Brian Swan and I attempted to solve the TDD Avatars problem as a live recital in our chosen style. We each had 35 minutes. The videos are here: Brian’s Inside-Out TDD approach Matt’s Outside-In approach When Brian had walked us through his approach and solution at the last month’s meeting, he’d …
Continue reading “Outside-In vs Inside Out – Comparing TDD Approaches”
Belly Wants to Eat Your Tests
Ever since I lead the team at Songkick through an Acceptance-Test-Driven re-write of their gorgeous web-ui, I’ve been thinking about problem of scaling a large suite of acceptance tests. By the time I left Songkick for the wilds of Scotland, it would take over 3 hours to run all the Cucumber tests on a single …
Battling Robots at Software Craftsmanship 2010
I’ve submitted a session for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 Conference. It’s a redux of the Robot Tournament I ran at SPA2010. The idea behind the session is to simulate the life of a start-up software company. In the early rounds of the tournament, the priority for each team is to get a robot, any robot, …
Continue reading “Battling Robots at Software Craftsmanship 2010”
Acceptance Tests Trump Unit Tests
At work, we have been practising something approximating Acceptance Test Driven Development now for several months. This means that pretty much every feature of the system that a user would expect to be there, has an automated test to ensure that it really is. It has given me a whole new perspective on the value …
Scrabbling up the Learning Curve
A few months ago I was at the peak of my powers. I was leading a team of ten C# developers building a huge project on Microsoft’s .NET platform. I had been working on the Windows platform for years, and there was rarely a question from the team I couldn’t answer quickly and confidently, drawing …
Come to CITCON
Some people think there is no conference for those of us who care about CI and testing, but oh yes there is. As an avid reader of this blog, I know that you, like me, realise that continuous integration and testing are to software development what the spirit level and the plumb-line are to the …
Behaviour-Driving Routes in Rails with RSpec
One thing that isn’t documented very well for RSpec is how to test your routes. I came across an old post on the rspec mailing list which described a great way to do this: describe TasksController “routing” do it “should route POST request for /tasks to the ‘create’ action” do params_from(:post, “/tasks”).should == {:controller =>; …
Continue reading “Behaviour-Driving Routes in Rails with RSpec”
Automating Javascript Unit Tests / Specs – Part 1
I’m building an Adobe Air application at the moment, which basically means loads of javascript development. We’re building it pure test-first, and have kicked off using jsUnit to get us started with something simple, flipping to the browser when we make a change and hitting the ‘run’ button in the jsTest testrunner HTML page. I’m …
Continue reading “Automating Javascript Unit Tests / Specs – Part 1”
jsUnit vs jsUnit
If, like me, you’ve been confused by the two different, identically-named, unit testing frameworks for javascript, here’s a very useful explanation of their strengths, weaknesses, and purposes.