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The guy who wrote Rails was clearly brilliant.  He just didn’t have alot of real world experience ~ Joe O’Brien, talking about the limitations of testing within Rails

So Joe O’Brien, from EdgeCase, is one of those really exciting presenters to watch because it is a certainty that both you and him are both going to learn something within 30 minutes.  Throwing the presentation safety net away and going off the map, Joe tackled the tangled subject of testing in rails by the only way that makes sense, actually doing it. Here is a bit of what you missed:

1. Make a rails project, open a test file and make some assertions.
2. Fix your errors and make more assertions.
3. goto step 2

This was a great way to see they subject matter come alive, warts and all.  If Joe had the courage to start hacking away at a program’s test code in front of 30 people, maybe it wont be so scary when you try it in the comfort and protection of your cube next week.   So here are some of the things we all learned from this demonstration:

• Mock up things to make tests more isolated can be proven by breaking the fixtures layer and demonstrating how brittle it really is.
• Separating controller tests from models and views is a good thing!
• Integration test that doesn’t start with the brower isn’t really integrated
• Changing from QUERTY to Devorak keyboard mappings a week before a live demo makes for awesome typos

Look to March for the marriage of Merb and Rails for an alternative to the ActiveRecord ORM.  Also, learn to love mocking in test and find a moching library that you like, be it RSpec or Mocha or FlexMock (which they use in EdgeRails because it WAS actually invented there).  Also, look to the Pragmatic Programmers for a screencast on testing from Joe and Jim sometime soon.