Hi all, I've been thinking about the whole validator/relationship speccing issue, and I came up with a suggestion, which I'd love to get some feedback on.
The full article is available at http://www.inter-sections.net/ 2007/10/19/what-to-test-and-specify-and-where-to-do-it/ , with the relevant bit being about halfway down, but here's the gist of it: 1. "@user.new(some attr) .. @user.should_be valid" is not behaviour specification, it's outcome specification, and as such should not be in any spec. It also happens to be testing someone else's code (the rails validation code), which shouldn't need to be specified since we didn't write it. 2. The reason why people (myself included) feel compelled to include stuff like that is, in great part, because it helps codify our assumptions about the way ActiveRecord (or any other external components) work, which are sometimes not clear (as with non-trivial validations) and liable to change as Rails evolves. Therefore, these are a new kind of beast - not a system integration test (not system-wide or anything to do with users), not a behaviour specification (not specifying our own code, outcome driven) - but instead what I'm currently calling an "assumption test". I feel that these should be formalised, because writing somethiing like: it “should validate_presence_of digits“ do PhoneNumber.expects(:validates_presence_of).with(:digits) load “#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/models/phone_number.rb“ end is only meaningful as a specification if you assume that "validates_presence of :digits" is the right syntax to use. So therefore, it is based on an assumption about ActiveRecord, that should be explicitly tested for at the unit level, so that if Rails behaves in a different way, you'll know about it at the unit level. So my suggestion would be that we create an "assumptions" folder somewhere in the rails folder hierarchy, so that we have 3 beasts: assumptions, specs, and stories. Obviously this could have dire consequences that I haven't thought of, hence why I'd like to hear what other people's opinions are about this. I've discussed some aspects of this briefly on #rspec with David (chelimsky) (I'm swombat), but would love more opinions about it, and it seems that all the fun stuff happens on the mailing list :-) Thanks for any feedback, Daniel http://www.inter-sections.net/ (swombat on freenode#rspec) _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
