I read this whole thread with interest (alerted by a cross-post on the
railsbridge list, thx Zach). Thanks Stephen for kicking off this
interesting discussion:
> Given time, I think the patterns facilitated by RSpec could
> *completely* revolutionize the way software happens everywhere, *if*
> the next generation of developers come to learn it first and not
as an
> "add-on." ...
>
> Does anyone else think that'd be pretty cool?
>
Yeah, I think having such resources available would be very cool. The
most common complaint I hear in IRC rooms is that there is no good
sample rails app that makes good use of RSpec and Cucumber. I think
there are some examples out there, but an app built as a tutorial
would
be much more helpful with the proper git tags and such. I mentioned
before that I was helping prepare a rails course. This is with my
local
Ruby group and we have started on a tutorial app:
http://github.com/urug/media_lender/tree/master
It thought it would be cool to use this project and BDD all the way
through and teach it like that. However, I have other commitments so
other people in the group will probably do most of the work without
BDD... It is something I would like to revisit someday and provide
such
an app. Have you started on a tutorial app like this yet?
I am very interested in understanding how to teach TDD/BDD. I learned
both as part of learning Rails. As an experienced programmer in other
languages it was really important to me to learn testing as I learned
this new language, since my motivation for learning was that I was
taking a job as a solo engineer on a legacy Rails 2.0.2 codebase. I
felt if I didn't really understand testing, I was going to be in a
world of hurt. I also was just really excited about cucumber when I
first heard about it.
I decided to start learning BDD on day 3 of learning Rails and
documented my experience as a tutorial here: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2008/12/rails-2-day-3-behavior-driven-development/
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2008/12/rails-2-day-4-rcov-and-more-behavior-driven-development/
Later I learned about RSpec and the out-of-the-box testing that comes
with Rails. I ended up hiring someone to work with me on the Rails
project since it ended up being a pretty big job and we used TDD as a
way to understand and document the codebase. Learning by doing with
pair programming was an awesome way to learn. We use Rspec mostly for
model testing and cucumber for integration (controller/view) testing.
We have a few specs for controller and views, but using cucumber at
the higher level seems to work very well.
Recently I taught a one-day workshop where I taught people who already
knew a different programming language how to program in Ruby on
Rails. I added in TDD in the afternoon and I think it worked really
well. (Note that we only got as far as model testing) I think it
worked well to scaffold first to introduce people to what a Rails app
"feels" like, then use testing as they add their own code.
I'll be teaching the same class in August and look forward to fleshing
out the curriculum a bit more and seeing if I can get some feedback
afterwards on how it was for the students. The workshop is "open
source" and you can look at what we taught here: http://wiki.devchix.com/index.php?title=Workshop_Topics
(see #Add_votes for where the TDD part starts. This is a work in
progress, and some of the notes are rough) In this workshop, I made
up the TDD part of the lesson on-the-fly with my pair-teacher since I
felt so strongly that it needed to be taught. Another teacher who
taught the class as it was originally written said that the adding
votes & associations section was hard to teach since you needed to
write so much code before you saw any results. The immediate feedback
of TDD makes it fun to teach.
As someone who recently learned Rails and Ruby, I feel strongly that
TDD/BDD should be learned right along with the rest of the framework.
While I do love RSpec, I'm not sure it should be taught first thing,
primarily since I think people should understand the parts that come
with, but it also feels like there is a lot of detailed APIs you need
to know. I do find it interesting that cucumber, which is a higher
level framework, doesn't feel that way.
Sarah
http://www.ultrasaurus.com
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