A couple of suggestions.
* Does the test fail if you run it alone from the command line (outside of rake) $ cd my_app $ ruby test/functional/alerts_controller_test
* Output the http response in the body of the test and see what is actually getting returned. def test_get_index get :index puts @response.body # (maybe this is response.body?) assert_response :success end
* Are you rendering any partials within the index template? There is (or at least was) a nasty bug in the compiling of partials which can lead to them working only in a certain order.
Chris