Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By : Mani Tadayon
Book Image

RSpec Essentials

By: Mani Tadayon

Overview of this book

This book will teach you how to use RSpec to write high-value tests for real-world code. We start with the key concepts of the unit and testability, followed by hands-on exploration of key features. From the beginning, we learn how to integrate tests into the overall development process to help create high-quality code, avoiding the dangers of testing for its own sake. We build up sample applications and their corresponding tests step by step, from simple beginnings to more sophisticated versions that include databases and external web services. We devote three chapters to web applications with rich JavaScript user interfaces, building one from the ground up using behavior-driven development (BDD) and test-driven development (TDD). The code examples are detailed enough to be realistic while simple enough to be easily understood. Testing concepts, development methodologies, and engineering tradeoffs are discussed in detail as they arise. This approach is designed to foster the reader’s ability to make well-informed decisions on their own.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
RSpec Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Testing for errors


Tests are written to prevent errors from happening. The experienced programmer knows that errors are inevitable, and seeks to anticipate them by writing tests that deal specifically with errors.

There are three basic cases to deal with when testing errors:

  • no error is raised

  • an external error (an error class not in the code under test) is raised

  • an internal error (a custom error class in the code under test) is raised

There are two basic decisions to make when writing code that raises an error.

The first is whether to allow an error to be raised or to attempt to recover from it with defensive practices, such as using a rescue block or fixing inputs that could cause an error to be raised. In general, lower-level, library code should expose errors without trying to recover from them, allowing the consumer of the code to handle error cases on their own. Higher-level application code should strive to recover from errors more aggressively, allowing only truly unrecoverable errors...