Testing

When developing anything, testing should always be at the forefront of your mind. After all, without testing, how are you supposed to know whether your application works or not? We certainly don't want our users to let us know about bugs. Hence, testing should always be a continuous task as you continue to build your application.

RoR provides a built-in testing environment for testing your application. So far, I've gone through testing our models. I will move onto controllers later. What I've seen so far is really nice! Firstly, RoR uses another database for testing. It does not touch your development database, nor your production database. By issuing the command:

>rake db:test:clone_structure

RoR will automatically clone the structure of your development database and create a new one according to your database configuration file. That's pretty neat. Next up, populating your database is easy as well. In RoR, there are things called fixtures which can be called before testing. These files populate your database with data that you need in order to run your test cases and are removed after testing.

For Unit Testing, all the models are available to you for testing. There are setup and teardown methods you can write that setup any pre-test things, such as creating files, and that remove anything post-test.

Testing is done in a usual manner using various assert methods. Errors and Failures are reported when running the tests.

One pretty neat thing is that RoR keeps statistics on your tests, such as code coverage. Simply type in:

>rake stats

and a table of statistics will appear. I will look into that a little more, but it should really helpful in determining whether or not the test cases are covering enough ground.

With RoR, it is very easy to design, code, and test in a continuous manner. Testing is so easy and integrated that it actually feels like its worth testing while I'm testing! That's rare!

W