Testing Heresies
summary
Argues that fine‑grained mocks break more than they help in real Rails apps, favoring database‑backed, top‑to‑bottom tests for tricky domains. Shows concrete failures: an XML ingestion bug caused by REXML calls, a slow partner ID lookup solved by adding a hash field and overwrote find in tests to force the fast path (which briefly broke suites), and a large external API replaced with a tested member service stub. Notes full suites often run minutes and parallel CI (EC2/Testure) cuts 40m→2m.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:19Testing is worth doing
- 7:34Mocking versus state
- 15:36TDD and real objects
- 27:35Slow tests in large apps
- 33:55Code structure limits
- 39:15Unknown unknowns
- 44:52Testing does not solve all problems
- 59:37Q&A
