Rspec

Test spies are a wonderful tool to utilize in the RSpec testing environment. When used in moderation and with care. Test spies require that a called method be stubbed so that it can be checked to see how it was invoked. I have put together a really simple class to demonstrate a test spy. class NotifyUser attr_reader :user def initialize(user) @user = user end def execute(params={}) mailer.notify({ message: params[:message] }) end def mailer SomeMailer.new(user) end end Notice in the test below that a test spy follows a pattern. There is a mock up section, an excercise section, and a verification section. Each of these are important and I always put a space in between the sections. It’s much easier to see what is happening in the test. ...

Recently I’ve been playing with Ruby’s class_eval and define_method to append methods to an object. Meta programming is something new for me and I had a problem that would benefit from using some of Ruby’s cool features. The Problem There was a model that had 6 fields that needed to be generated at some point in time. Some fields had to be unique and others had to be generated a bit differently. Here is a contrived example of what I was doing: ...

One day I found myself riding in a car with my family and it was a long road trip, with little to no internet and realized that my tests required internet connectivity. I was also heavily dependent upon code examples that I could find. I’ve been absolutely horrible with testing my code. I would write code, test it out in the ruby console and then push it live. It felt like I was moving fast. I was being agile. Wrong! Testing is necessary in order to succeed. Often I would push code and do the good ole’ cowboy code em’ up. This is a horrible idea, don’t do that. ...