Last week, my development team and I ran across a problem with a library we had written several months before that parsed spreadsheets given to us by one of our clients and inserted the data provided into the database. At the time we weren’t sure what the problem was. We decided to run the tests and two frustratingly useless things occurred. First, all of the tests passed. Second, the test suite took 3 hours to run.

Here’s what we had done in our “unit tests.” We had placed several of these spreadsheets as examples into our fixtures folder. Then, we had created the importer object and told it to import. We then checked the results. These tests take a long time, specifically because an import can sometimes take 15 minutes depending on the amount of data we need to import. So, how do you fix something like that? Here are some ideas.

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create, data, datasets, isolation, mock, mocking, object, test, testing, unit tests

Having used both Test::Unit and RSpec, I have to agree with Jim Weirich: the difference between the two is primarily semantics. It seems to me that functionally, they are both equally capable of verifying and specifying code. However, the way in which you write the tests—the semantics—is the primary difference between the two. That being the case, I prefer the semantics of RSpec.
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cucumber, rspec, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, specification, test, test/unit, testing, unit tests