So, that was a great response to my questions. Thanks a lot, guys. Nick, Thanks for your help and your suggestions and your time. The articles you linked to were helpful, no doubt.
Pat, I realize now that you're the guy I first heard about story runner from with your screencast on it. I think I saw that about a year ago and I'm just now getting into testing.... shame shame shame. Your insights are warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. You are right when you say that it is never feasible to take weeks off to write code. Well, it has been one week now and I've taken your advice to start writing tests for code that I am changing or fixing. I promptly downloaded Cucumber and Webrat and set up an 'rspec' branch for my app in order to cherry pick commits with the master. All of a sudden, though, I didn't know anything about Cucumber, Webrat, or writing "features". Not only that, I could only find scarce, miniature examples of Cucumber. No examples I found had much to do with a rails app, anyhow. So, I wrote one Feature and that worked out fine, I guess. I just haven't figured out how to re-use a Step, so that's tripping me up. Controller Specs are a different story... I've written three controller specs! Are they good controller specs, Lake? Well, maybe... I'm not quite sure. I guess the "question" turned from "How do I become confident in my code? Write Specs!" to "How do I become confident in my Specs?!" On the positive side, I feel like I am getting stronger with speccing. I've been using mocking and stubbing like I never have before. I think some things are becoming more natural, easier to grasp. I think the reason my brain wouldn't have it was because I was not USING IT, I just passively read about it... but I think I've hit that AHA moment with mocking and stubbing - or, at least, I'm steadily on my way to the climax of the moment. Thanks for your suggestions and help! I haven't read all of Chelimsky, or his friend's blogs, but I will. I did download the merb-core, though. :) Matt Wynne, "Working Effective With Legacy Code" is on the way. Thanks for taking time out of your day to help out. Hopefully, I'll be high fiving much more in the future. Oh, your latest article on your blog struck a note with me... also it led me to Michael Feathers blog, Thanks! Mark Wilden, First, your suggestion about mocking and stubbing really encouraged me to take up the task of learning about and using them. I feel like I actually experienced my AHA moment. I think you are right about testing units and keeping a unit, a unit. I'll certainly use Mocks and Stubs when I end up unit testing and then I'll fondly remember your post. Avdi Grimm, Thank you much for your added input. Especially about the book! Scott Taylor, Your post encouraged me to relax. The idea of "chipping away" really hit home with me especially since I have a... don't say it... a pickaxe! You are correct about not having enough time. I'll definitely generate the specdoc for the boss. ---- Hopfully, I didn't leave anything important out... but now on to the mashed peas: Taking Pat's suggestion, I downloaded Cucumber - if you haven't used it, try it out. I haven't used story runner, so there! Anyways, I downloaded Cucumber and started writing a feature and the steps. Here is what I came up with: http://pastie.org/266264 That feature passes with flying covers. Am I in the right direction with it, though? Unfortunately, my feature fun ran out when I tried to re-use a step name in a different step file... Apparantly you can't duplicate steps? So, I moved on to a controller spec for a controller called "admin/issues". Here is what I came up with... Don't cry, it's ugly: http://pastie.org/266272 That should be fairly readable, but I don't really know if I'm doing the right stuff. Any pointers would be very helpful. Those are the two files that I came up with in the last week. Well, I came up with a couple more, but those are the more completed ones. I'm really grateful that this stuff is falling in line, or at least I hope it is. Thanks for your time guys. Lake -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users