Hi all,
I am going to paint a probably familiar scene. My first rails project was a supposedly simple web application, which has now been under development for 2 years, has expanded to about 12 models, and is a full blown web application.
As a newbie to ruby and rails, I paid exactly zero attention to testing at the beginning, and as a result, I probably have over a thousand lines of code now, and zero lines of test code. I realize the error of my ways, especially now that I am tracking down a very elusive bug, and I would even like to move to a TDD/BDD model with my idea guy.
The problem that I am facing is twofold: first I'm not a software developer in real life, so I don't have much exposure to the "testing world" in the first place. I had to look up the difference between a unit test, a functional test, and an integration test. But beyond even that, I am having trouble understanding the "state of the union" as far as testing rails web-apps is concerned. There seem to be so many different products, and I don't really understand which ones test what, and how much testing is required. Where do they overlap?
I'm aware of the built-in testing functionality, but I'm reading that people are using that less and less. Then I read about rspec and cucumber. Cool stuff, but does it _replace_ testing with the built-in Test::Unit?
I read the series of posts here: rubyyot.com and what I came away with was that something like cucumber is good for functional testing, but unit testing should still be done with Test::Unit. And that it is important to keep the two roughly in sync... as cucumber drives your development of new units, be sure to test them with the built-in testing as you go.
Comments or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right track here?