Don't Unleash the Stubs!

inchworms - Wed 17 July, 2013 Tweet

Today we watched the rest of Part 2 of PeepCode’s excellent RSpec video tutorial. This one covered:

The three stages of testing

• Automated testing with RSpec
• Manual Testing with QA testing
• Production deployment with customers

API discovery

• Writing an example to describe expected output
• Learning how an API works by writing examples
• Using XPath syntax with Nokogiri (although @svenfuchs suggested using CSS instead)
• Extracting the author name from an RSS feed

Custom Matcher

• Extracting a post’s publication date
• Parsing an XML date into a Ruby object
• Writing a custom matcher (see David Chelimsky’s wiki)
• Verifying the parsing of the date object

Configuration Options

• Creating a .rpsec file
• Understanding the options in the rspec command
• Using an alternate report formatter
• Setting custom options as the default

Retrieving Data

• Retreiving data from an external server
• Organising network code for easier testing

Stubs & Mocks

• Understanding stubs and mocks
• Using paceholder code to make your examples faster and more consistent
• Intercepting network calls with a stub
• Expecting specific methods to be called with a mock

Stub Syntax:

	# Syntax
	my_object.stub(:my_method).and_return(my_data)

	# Usage in this tutorial
	client.stub(:get).and_return(xml)

But don’t forget:

Context, Edge Cases, Corner Cases

• Writing examples for non-successful edge and corner cases
• Organising examples into success and error contexts
• Learning to think about ways things could go wrong
• Discovering errors and anticipating them in your code