Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Testing Velocity Part 2 - Why do we test?

A couple weeks ago, I began a series on keeping your test suite fast and effective. I now am going to digress a bit, take a step back and view the big picture to establish context.
Before addressing test performance and what makes up a good test, we should ask ourselves why is it that […]

Testing Velocity - Keeping your test suite fast, Part 1

If you are a Ruby or Rails developer, and you know what you are doing, you are writing tests or specs. Tests express the intent of your code, help verify correctness, and aid in design and exploration. Rails gives you helpful conventions to follow and functional and integration testing support for free out […]

Dave Thomas’ testing library (thrown in github)

Dave recently blogged a very cool little test framework he whipped up. Its under 100 lines of code and he says he definitely does not plan on supporting it publicly.
At the very least I intend on playing with it and incorporating some of the ideas, so I put it up on github. […]

autotest without the unit_diff

Ever since getting ZenTest 3.9.1, it seems unit-diff is always turned on. That means your output in autotest is noiser, and I prefer the normal output from my spec or test framework. Anyways, I'm not sure what changed since earlier versions of autotest (maybe the rails command used to override the command string?), [...]

[ANN] multi_rails 0.0.4 Released

MultiRails lets you test your Rails plugin or app against many versions of Rails in one sweep.
DESCRIPTION:
MultiRails allows easy testing against multiple versions of Rails for your Rails specific gem or plugin. It also has tentative support testing Rails applications against multiple versions of Rails.
Use MultiRails to hook in Rails 2.0 testing in your [...]

Making CrossCheck work with Prototype 1.6

We are using Crosscheck for javascript unit tests lately. Crosscheck has fake DOM implementations for Firefox 1.0, 1.5 and IE6 (!!), so it runs headless and it runs fast. This is a tool I've wanted for a long time, but writing a fake browser is no small task so there are still quite [...]

multi_rails has been released

MultiRails allows easy testing against multiple versions of Rails for
your Rails specific gem or plugin.
Use MultiRails to hook in Rails 2.0 testing in your continuous integration. Still working on Rails 2.0 support? Use MultiRails to see where your test suite falls down against the 2.0 preview releases of Rails.
sudo gem install multi_rails...view the [...]

Overriding setup in Rail’s test_helper - impossible?

Is there a way that will just work for adding common setup code to test_helper? None of the below work:

# this breaks fixtures in the acts_as_authenticated account_controller_test (but nowhere else, for some reason)...
  def setup
  end

# this breaks things all over the place
  def setup
     super
  end

# this is the way I think [...]

Did redgreen get borked?

I recently had to reinstall all my favorite gems and tools on a powerbook, and desired colored test goodness. So after bringing in redgreen and zentest gems, amongst others, I saw the following:

rob@fixx:~/src/relevance/pharminst/trunk$ rake|redgreen
-bash: redgreen: command not found
^Crake aborted!

rob@fixx:~/src/relevance/pharminst/trunk$ rake|rg
/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/redgreen-1.2.2/bin/rg:6: can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
from [...]

Quick Note on zentest 3.5

Ryan released zentest 3.5 last week, and for some reason a normal 'sudo gem update' wasn't picking it up. Searching remote gems for 'zentest' reveals why:
*** REMOTE GEMS ***
ZenTest (3.4.3, 3.4.2, 3.4.1, 3.4.0, 3.3.0, 3.2.0, 3.1.0, 3.0.0)
ZenTest provides 4 different tools and 1 library: zentest,
unit_diff, autotest, [...]