October 9, 2008 – 12:23 pm
The other day I was running in a weird error on Devver. After running around twenty test runs on the system, the component that actually runs individual unit tests was crashing due to “Too many open files - (Errno::EMFILE)”
Unfortunately, I didn’t know much more than that. Which files were being kept open? I knew that [...]
October 1, 2008 – 10:04 pm
This is the third post in my series of Ruby tools articles. This time I look at Ruby code quality tools. Rubyists like Ruby because the code can look so nice, simple, and sometimes beautiful. Unfortunately not all code is so great, in fact often the code I write doesn’t look good. Fortunately while a [...]
September 30, 2008 – 9:57 am
This is the second post in my series of Ruby tools articles. This time I am focused on Ruby test quality tools. Devver is always really interested in testing, and obviously the quality of a project’s tests is important. We are always looking at ways to add even more value to the investment teams put [...]
September 4, 2008 – 3:19 pm
I am am a big believer in software testing. I normally have created tests after writing my code and mostly to ensure that regressions of functionality don’t occur when the code is changed. As I have become more comfortable with testing, and the changes it requires such as writing testable code, I have found even [...]
Miško Hevery has written up a nice collection of tips on writing testable code on his blog. Some of the tips are a bit hard to understand and apply, but it sounds like he will be going into many of them in more detail in the weeks to come (or you can use this list [...]
We have been trying to work with some different Ruby technologies lately. We are moving to RSpec from Test::Unit, because we believe it has several advantages. It also seems all the cool projects are moving to RSpec: Rubinius, Typo, Mephisto, and of course Merb.
In learning these two technologies together, I have found a few resources [...]
For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a series of posts on my thoughts on unit testing. Although I originally published them in little, bite-sized posts, I wanted to collect them all here in one massive post for those of you with bigger reading appetites.
I also wanted to add one thought to sort of [...]
Tip 8: Keep learning!
Just like learning new programming languages makes you a better developer, learning about new testing approaches, libraries, and tools will make you a better tester. The state of the art of testing is changing very rapidly these days - new frameworks and techniques are released almost every month. Keep looking at example [...]
Tip 7: Be reasonable
There are lots of reasons why tests are great, but if your practices aren’t ultimately making your code better and you more productive, it’s not worth it. You have to always think about the return on your time investment.
There are domains in which automated testing is very difficult and doesn’t provide a [...]
Tip 6: Don’t be dogmatic
There are a lot of best practices for testing that may or may not apply to your situation. Should you have one assertion per test? Should you use mocks and stubs? Should you use Test Driven Development? Or Behavior Driven Development? Should you do interaction or state-based testing? While all of [...]
subscribe to our feed