[rspec-users] specs on private methods

[Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)]

Daniel Tenner:

> Might be a personal thing, but my approach is that I try to test the
> public behaviour of the object. Testing private methods is, imho,
> getting dangerously close to specifying how the object does its
> business, rather than what it does.

I agree on principle, but I ran into the following case in my PhD:

There’s a Decomposition class that decomposes an FSM to a given
architecture. Its public methods should be new() and decompose!().
Now, decompose!() works by running a private method by_input_sets!()
many times with different parameters. 

One run of by_input_sets!() takes a couple of seconds, so can be tested;
one run of decompose!() takes much longer, so to test decompose!()
I should stub by_input_sets!() so it returns canned data (right?).

In this situation, I think I do need to test/spec the by_input_sets!()
private method – otherwise there would be no code that would check on
the way it works.

-- Shot
-- 
A school in the UK is using RFID chips in school uniforms to track
attendance. So now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry
your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere.   -- Bruce Schneier
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/rspec-users/attachments/20080111/66c1481b/attachment.bin