Noel Rappin Writes Here

As it happens, my generic advice on Rails testing hasn’t changed substantially, even though the tools I use on a daily basis have. Any testing tool is better than no testing. Okay, that’s glib. You can make an unholy mess in any tool. You can also write valuable tests in any tool. Focus on the valuable part. If you’ve never tested a Rails application before, I still recommend you start with out of the box stuff: Test::Unit, even fixtures.

Consider this part of an occasional series where I attempt to revisit tools discussed in Rails Test Prescriptions that have undergone some revision. (NOTE: Most of this was written before the DHH Twitter-storm about testing this week. For the purposes of this post, I’m choosing to pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.) The cucumber-rails gem released version 0.4 last week, which had some significant changes, and intensified what we might call the opinionated nature of Cucumber over what a Cucumber scenario should look like.

When I say that I’m really bad at self-marketing, one of the things that I mean is that I’ve left this blog basically dark for almost a month. This was an especially good idea because a) the TextMate post on Feb 10 became the most read post on this site ever by a factor of 5 over the previous three most popular posts (the PeepOpen review, the iaWriter review, and the thing about writing bad code, in case you care), and b) my book actually came out in print during this time.