No, a different capybara (Picture by PanBK)
I spent some time recently playing with Ruby on Rails and BDD (Behaviour Driven Development), using Cucumber and Capybara. I have generally not done much testing when writing code, except for some classes in university. I can see the usefulness of it, but I never really got in the habit. Time for a change.
Playing around with Cucumber was a lot of fun. I like the shift from thinking about what your software should do and describing it in plain text, to actually writing software. That way there is no idle time where you’re thinking about what you should be doing, but you are writing those thoughts out, making them more tangible. I think that way the whole testing workflow does not necessarily take up more time, when you look at it that way.
Defining steps (using Capybara) was a nice exercise in Ruby programming, which I am really enjoying. Python, which I mostly use, is very nice as well though, so I’m not getting rid of that anytime soon. Ruby software does read nicely though. If only the syntax was indentation based…
A problem I ran into is what should I be testing with what tool. As I am just getting started, I guess that is something you learn while doing. But trying to find an article or guids with some best practices was not easy. I ended up checking out some very helpful examples on Github, with extensive tests (models, controllers and views), and replicated that, only to later run into the claim that testing views is a bad idea. This makes sense to me, but it would be nice to run into something like this sooner. I would like to write something like this later, when I have some more experience.
Right now I am just trying to find the balance between testing and coding, probably going too heavy on the testing, but that is a good learning experience. That is why I started the exercise, so I am happy. So far BDD gets a thumbs up from me.
