Its tempting to see features as a kind of extended test tool, I certainly looked at them in that way initially. However I think this isn't really the most profitable way to look at them, nor how they were designed. It would probably be worthwhile if you looked up some articles on BDD, and perhaps pondered a little further on the ideas of customer developer communication, and of features driving development. Also have a look at the declarative vs imperative feature stuff that has appreared in this list and in Ben Mabey's articles.
Once you do this you might agree that features are not an appropriate tool for doing low-level testing, like testing individual models and controllers. They certainly can reduce the need to do some tests in the normal rails/rspec testing stack e.g. view testing but there much more a design/communication tool than a testing tool In particular I don't see that driving unit tests with features as being particularly productive because 1) Customers don't need to know the details of unit tests (they're is to much detail for them to comprehend). In fact writing unit tests as features actually pollutes the feature space meaning that you end up having to try and seperate one kind of feature from another 2) Programmers should be able to understand unit tests (they don't need the story format) 3) Unit tests are by nature very detailed and the step matching step writing mechanism is pretty inefficient at expressing this, even with FIT tables 4) Features run slowly in comparison to well written test suites, so running autospec with them gets unproductive fairly quickly. This will be made worse if you create lots of extra features. To summarize see features as things that drive development and bridge the customer developer divide, then once you start developing something use unit tests to ensure the intimate details of your models and to help with regression etc.. Then have a ponder about what you need in the controller, view testing area. This should work fairly well in Rails if you use 'fat model skinny controller'. There's definitely the need for a really insightful blog article(s) into the detail of moving through this process of feature to implementation via unit test etc.. I get the feeling there's quite alot of personal style involved and certainly haven't worked out how to do it myself yet Anyhow HTH Andrew 2008/11/21 James Byrne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > James Byrne wrote: > >> into this. Now, so far I have considered three possibilities: > > Ok, five... > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-users@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users > _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
