Testing Practices Interview 5: James Golick
Before I get to this interview, a brief program note—if you are interested in participating in this interview series, or if you have a request for some Rails developer that you’d like me to pester with questions about testing, please let me know at railsprescriptions at gmail dot com.
On to the interivew. James Golick is the founder of GiraffeSoft, a boutique Rails consulting firm out of Montreal. He also maintains the James on Software blog. Within the Rails community, he’s the author of resource_controller, a common parent for RESTful controllers, and active_presenter, which allows you to create presenter objects out of aggregations of ActiveRecord models.
Most recently, James has created zebra, a test library for the quick creation of single line tests.
How did you get into writing tests regularly? Did you have a specific moment when you realized automated testing was valuable?
I worked at a few really cheaply run companies, where I was the one man technology department. I didn’t sleep much in those days.
In those days, I was always desperately looking for ways to get better at what I was doing, if only to get the occasional extra hour of sleep. At one point, I came accross an article about automated testing and TDD, and it all just made so much sense to me. When you’re that strapped for time, automation is a necessity. Once I was introduced to the idea that tests could be automated, too, I jumped all over it.
What is your Rails testing process? What kinds of tests do you write, and what tools do you use to write them?
At giraffesoft, we’re very serious about TDD. So, naturally, everything we do is test-first.
Currently, we write extensive unit tests and functional tests. We’re slowly adding cucumber to the mix. I’m definitely sold on the benefits of acceptance test driven development. So, that’s where we’re going.
We use Shoulda, largely because of its macros. Duplication in tests becomes incredibly tedious. So, expressing certain kinds of repetitive tests as one-liners is a huge win.
However, as I mentioned in the release announcement for zebra, we’ve started to feel the burn with Shoulda’s macros in certain situations. Often, test failures result in completely useless backtraces and the string programming catches up to you after a while.
So, we’re currently moving towards a context & zebra stack to replace Shoulda.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve discovered about testing recently?
Using Jay Fields’ expectations testing framework completely changed the way that I approach unit tests. Not having to describe each test in english is incredibly liberating.
If your code is readable, you shouldn’t need to document it at a micro level, except in special cases. Your code probably isn’t littered with comments describing every couple of lines. So, why should your tests be?
Is there a tool you wish you had for testing, but which you don’t think currently exists?
If you’d asked me 2 weeks ago, I’d have replied, something that would allow me to write more expectations-like tests in my every day hacking. That’s what zebra is. So, now I’m feeling pretty happy about my toolset and where things are headed.
What advice would you give somebody looking to write more effective tests?
Be pragmatic. I get a lot of questions about the “proper” way to mock or stub something, for example. Stop worrying about getting things “right” and try to make judgements that get you the best possible test, while striking a balance between productivity and the longevity of the test.
Additionally, I’d really encourage people to use expectations for a small project – a rails plugin or something. For various reasons, you probably won’t want to use it for every day stuff, but you might learn a lot from giving it a serious look.
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