What I Write About When I Write About Tests

So, I’ve decided to write a book about testing. Which begs the question: what goes in a book about testing?

I decided almost immediately to use a format with a series of short sections, somewhat along the lines of a recipe or hacks book. A full-on narrative book following a single site would be hard to do for testing—you’d wind up bringing in all kinds of details about the site being built that would distract from the test content.

I’ve never done anything in a recipe-esque style, and I like the idea that it’s a flexible format that would be easy to expand and keep curent over time. In case I haven’t mentioned it enough times, the goal here is to keep this book from decaying—a short-section format enables that somewhat.

Having decided on that format, the “prescriptions” name came out of a thesaurus search on “recipes” to try and come up with a word that seemed suitable. I liked the health metaphor, so—name chosen. One of these days I need to register the domain for the obvious misspelling…

My own experience as a connoisseur of several recipe books is that they can be pretty hit and miss. Typically, there are some recipes that are indispensable, some others that I already know, and some that are specific and don’t apply to me. Done well, it’s worth the time and effort. Not done well, and you feel like you’ve bought a $30 dollar book for $9 of content. (I’m hoping that offering my book for $9 will mitigate this complaint somewhat…)

This begs a number of related questions. Aim the book at a beginning user, intermediate, or advanced? Focus on Shoulda or RSpec? Obviously, any decision here has an impact on who will find this book useful.

For the user question, I tried some basic user modeling and profiling techniques, ending up with the following two (oversimplified) groups that I want to satisfy.

  • Beginner to intermediate programmers who know Rails, but haven’t done much testing. If the code samples I see in resumes and projects we take over is any indication, there are rather a lot of you. These readers don’t need me to define Rails concepts, but they probably would like to have a description of what testing tools are available, how to use them, and most importantly, why to use them.
  • Intermediate to advanced programmers who already do testing, but are looking for a single point of reference for testing tools. These programmers probably are looking for the book to be a guide to testing some more specific cases, like, say, file uploads, they also want plain reference material, and stuff that will help persuade recalcitrant colleagues might be nice.

How to balance these? What I’m trying to do is make sure that the “basic” prescriptions, like “I need to test models” will have enough reference material to make them useful for advanced users, while making the “advanced” prescriptions something that the beginner users will be able to use as needed.

As for tools, I think this one might change over time (perhaps due to feedback from potential readers…), but the current guidelines are:

  • By default, use the base Rails test facilities. The 2.2 update was helpful here in that it closed some of the gap between base Rails and RSpec/Shoulda
  • Any test framework that has a significant user base will get one prescription just on how to install and use it.
  • Where one of the external frameworks offers a feature that’s not in the base test set, that feature will be covered where appropriate—so RSpec’s view testing setup will be included as part of the section on view testing, Shoulda contexts are discussed in a style section on grouping setups, and so on.

I’m hoping this set of guidelines will make the book as useful as possible for as many of you as I can. But one reason for starting to talk about the book now is to get feedback about these choices while there’s still time for me to do something about it.

  1. Hugo says:

    Nice. When the book will be released? I'm really interested into testing but don't know yet how to start and do it in a proper way. Hopes your book help me. Congrats for the initiative and the attractive price!

  2. Noel says:

    Hoping for a soft release in early January, when the book gets to be about half or 2/3rds done.

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