[rspec-users] Philosophical questions

[Evan David Light]

Awesome!  That's a whole lot more of a response than I had  
anticipated.  Thanks!

On Sep 12, 2007, at 6:15 PM, David Chelimsky wrote:

> On 9/12/07, Evan David Light <evan at tiggerpalace.com> wrote:
> I like to start w/ integration tests before anything exists at all.
> You can do that w/ Rails' Integration Tests or Story Runner (if you're
> using RSpec's trunk).
>

Story Runner is a new one for me.  I'll have to look it up.  Thanks!

(Halfway through writing this, I realized, courtesy of Google, that  
it's a recently integrated piece of functionality into RSpec-on- 
Rails.  I found this example of yours captured here. )

I see why this could be a good way to start coding.  This is exactly  
what I naturally wanted to do with RSpec but couldn't because RSpec  
seems oriented toward a lower-level set of issues.  I'll have to  
start playing with the trunk now.  This looks nifty.

> If you don't want broken software, then spec the views - but ONLY
> the stuff that actually has business value.
>

Seems like sound common sense.  I caught myself earlier today writing  
a spec for a non-functional portion of my view, chided myself for it,  
ripped out the spec, and then continued.

> Once the view is sufficiently spec'd and the specs are passing, I know
> what the controller needs to supply, so I start spec'ing the
> controller. And on down to models.

Good to realize that I'm not thinking that far off the mainstream here.

> That's not to say that the philosophy isn't important. I, personally,
> love talking about philosophy. It helps me to understand why I
> gravitate towards the things I do.

Ultimately, this is what I was looking for: not so much "what to do"  
but the "tao" of it.  Starting with the user in mind, from a view  
level, made some sense but too minutiae driven.  I like to dabble  
with new approaches but always asking "why?" along the way.  While a  
lot of what I have been doing with RSpec could be accomplished with  
Test::Unit, I'm finding that I prefer the RSpec approach somewhat more.

> Same w/ approaches to testing and developing software. Agile isn't all
> that agile if we're all finding "best practices" and applying them
> like a bunch of blind followers of some religion.

Or if we spend so much time on "best practices" that we're not  
actually accomplishing anything?  Welcome to the government. ;-)

> "We have come to
> value individuals and interactions over processes and tools," yet
> we're always becoming slave to the next tool rather than becoming its
> master and sticking it in our tool belt.

<wisecrack> You mean that instead of being Java Juju Zombies that  
we're becoming Ruby Robots? </wisecrack>

> Summing up - the series of steps I described above is what I *usually*
> do because I know it works for me and the way I work. But I don't do
> that 100% of the time, and I certainly don't feel bad when I break
> that pattern. It's just a great tool to have lying around.
>

And, of course, what works for one may not work for all.  However,  
with regard to Rails apps, I'm still finding my way.  That said, I  
know that I would prefer a TDD/BDD approach to writing it, hand  
testing it, seeing it mostly work, fix something (and perhaps  
breaking something else!), rinsing and repeating.


Thanks for the brain dump!

Evan
IMs (all): sleight42
http://evan.tiggerpalace.com



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