Topic: flexmock

ChicagoRuby meeting ‘Test Prescriptions’ recap

John McCaffrey, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 @ 12:41 pm

The ChicagoRuby users group (not to be confused with chirb.org another great Chicago Ruby user group) held their second meeting at their downtown location.

While the meetings out in Elmhurst are always informative and helpful,  the downtown location may allow for a bigger crowd, and the weekday time might work better for more people. Plus, the Illinois Technology Association - Tech Nexus is right next to Union Station which works great for people that still have to go out to the suburbs.

Noel Rappin's talk covered some of the most common questions he gets through the Pathfinder Development Blog, and his own site RailsPrescriptions site RailsRX.com dedicated exclusivly to testing.

There's too much detail to cover here, but at a high-level, Noel covered:

• The why, how, when, and where questions that make the foundation of a good testing approach
• Testing techniques for legacy projects
• A good review of the different testing frameworks, what their differences are, and some discussion about each (test::unit, shoulda, rspec, cucumber)
• A solid review of different factory tools that go beyond standard fixtures (Factory Girl, Fixture Replacement, Machinist, and Object Daddy)
• Strategies for migrating from Fixtures
• Differences between the mocking frameworks:  Flexmock, mocha, rspec, and RR (double ruby)
• Finding the right balance, and avoiding the pitfalls of 'over mocking'
• Cucumber testing workflow (and where cucumber doesn't work well)

The audience seemed to have a wide range of experience, but all had opinions to share about what they've learned about testing.  After the talk everyone seemed fell into small groups to network and exchange ideas and contact info, and a group gathered around Ray and Noel as they tossed around some ideas on potential future meeting topics "Ruby IDE/Editor review", "Rails Jumpstart", "Coding Dojo".

The organizers took a stab at hosting the meeting virtually over gotomeeting (not sure if it was recorded or not).

Their next meeting is scheduled for July 18th, details can be found in their meetup.com group.

The organizers of the ChicagoRuby.com group are also the organizers of the 2nd annual WindyCityRails Conference right here in Chicago, on Sept, 12th, which Noel will be presenting at.

• Digg
• Reddit
• del.icio.us

Comments (0)

Software Development