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

Chapter 8. Tackling the Challenges of End-to-end Testing

In Chapter 7, Building an App from the Outside In with Behavior-Driven Development, we learned about BDD and wrote a feature file to define the behavior of a small web app. Now we are going to build our todo list manager. We'll start with a rich JavaScript UI defined in AngularJS, then move on to the TDD of a backend API and model. We'll discuss some of the difficulties of BDD along with some ideas for how to take advantage of its benefits while avoiding its pitfalls. We'll end with an initial implementation of authentication middleware for our API using JSON Web Token.

Here are some of the things we'll learn in this chapter:

  • Iterating between acceptance tests and application code

  • Building a rich JavaScript web UI with AngularJS

  • Testing UI interactions with a rich web app

  • Using Rack middleware for authentication