Just to add a couple cents in... I've been working as either a sysadmin or software developer for the last 10 years (software development pretty much exclusively for the last 5 or 6). I started picking up Rails about 2 years ago, and though I was always aware of TDD - and even occasionally dabbled in it - I never really embraced it. Not because I didn't see its importance, but because the barrier to entry always seemed too high, and schedules never allowed for it (as a friend of mine is fond of saying, "You mean we don't have time to do it right, but we have time to do it over and over again?").
Right now I'm working on a personal project for which I have no QA team to watch my back, so instead I'm doggedly using top-down BDD with Cucumber (and unit tests) to help keep me in line. I think the biggest hurdle to learning it is this: Pretty much all the tutorials and docs written on the topic center around some simple example app that's easy to test. But in the real world, software is messy, and tends to resist being tested. I know the traditional counter argument is that this means your design is flawed, but that isn't always true. One of the biggest challenges I faced was how to test authentication in my application, in which users sign in using their Twitter credentials via OAuth[1]. Another was in testing my own endpoints that create JSON that's rendered via JS in the browser[2]. Maybe Selenium could have helped here, but creating tests in general was already slowing me to the point that I'm a good deal behind schedule, and I couldn't take another day or so to learn how to use Selenium with the risk that it might not really suit my situation for one reason or another - because software is messy. One that I haven't tackled yet but will have to soon is how to test code that runs as a BackgrounDRb worker. I came up with solutions for all of this (except for the BDRb stuff), but I'm not entirely sure of their quality. They certainly feel hackish, but I can't put my finger on why. I suspect David Chelimsky or Ben Mabey or Aslak or any of a hundred or more other people could have come up with beautiful, elegant solutions to the challenges I faced, but since none of them were standing over my shoulder I have no way of knowing, and none of this is covered in the write-a-blog-in-10-minutes Rails demo. That has been my challenge in learning and using BDD. [1] My solution: http://tr.im/oW8y [2] I defined these two custom steps (JSON_CALLBACK is defined as the :callback arg I pass in my 'render :json' calls - but it will trip the JSON parser if its there): Then /^I should get valid JSON$/ do assert_nothing_raised do assert JSON.parse(@response.body.gsub(/^#{JSON_CALLBACK}\((.*)\)/, '\1')) end end Then /^I should find "(.+)" in JSON/ do |xpath| json_hash = JSON.parse(@response.body.gsub(/^#{JSON_CALLBACK}\((.*)\)/, '\1')) xmldoc = Nokogiri::XML(json_hash.to_xml) xpath.gsub!('_', '-') # in XML, underscores will be dashes. xpath = "./hash" + xpath unless xpath =~ /^\/\// assert !xmldoc.xpath(xpath).blank? end -- Bill Kocik http://bkocik.net _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
