Test Driven Development and testing in general are very popular among Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. The fact that any new Rails project that you generate automatically includes basic tests as part of the scaffolding and generators serves as some pretty good reinforcement of that.

This chapter was not meant to serve as an introduction to Test Driven Development or testing or even to try to reinforce the value of writing tests. If the testing tools provided by Rails are not suitable to our needs, there are numerous testing frameworks available that can be used instead. There are also a myriad breakdowns of what types of tests should be written for what types of scenarios and under what circumstances.

Redmine has very good code coverage and provides a lot of excellent examples of the basic test types in its own test/ directory. Our tests in this chapter were meant to be examples of how to tie plugin testing into Redmine's testing infrastructure and how Redmine test assets could be...