Double Shot #613

Last week of the year. This one can't end soon enough for me.

• Blueprints 0.4.0 - Another replacement for factories and fixtures with some nice syntactic sugar.
• Ruby 1.8.7-p248 released - Can't really tell how significant this is because reading Ruby's own changelogs is a mystery to me.
• holidays - Gem to extend the Ruby date class to make it holiday aware. Works well, once you figure out you have to require the individual holiday support for whatever region you're interested in.
• CoffeeScript - Rubyish language that compiles down to JavaScript.
• RMSforms - CSS styling framework especially for forms.
• formtastic-sass - Sass mixins to style formtastic forms. If only I liked sass.
• MySQL and Postgres command equivalents (mysql vs psql) - Handy if you switch back and forth.
• email-spec - Matchers and steps for testing email with RSpec and Cucumber.
• rspec-integration - A mind meld between regular Rails integration tests and RSpec. So far I like this much better than Cucumber.

Comments

[Bharat Ruparel]

Hello Mike,
I have been reading your daily posts for a long time and have come to like them very much. I am somewhat puzzled to read that you don't like Cucumber?

I had not seriously done any testing with Cucumber until recently. It turns out that for developing specifications that the users can relate to there is nothing that I have seen or read about that comes close to Cucumber and Webrat combination. I have a feeling that Cucumber/Webrat might just be the combination that we need to break into "Enterprise" mindset.

I am simply amazed at how well the combination works.

Bharat

[Scott Motte]

Mike, I don't like cucumber either. Take a look at my post on just using webrat. You might find this approach useful. http://spitfiresky.com/blog/how-you-should-be-doing-testing-in-rails.html

[Mike Gunderloy]

I've been on several projects that employed Cucumber, and as far as I could tell, the main use was to generate lots of billable hours while giving the developers a warm-and-fuzzy "look we're doing BDD" experience, as well as to soak up time writing regular expressions. Did not have any success getting business/end users to read and understand Cucumber files. So maybe we were doing it wrong, maybe my customers were stupid, but it was not good bang for the buck for me. For integration tests that are designed to make sure developers don't accidentally break, other alternatives are much less work.

[Mark Wilden]

I always use Cucumber features and I hardly ever show them to business. So why do it?

For BDD. It's simply easier to write English sentences than code, because it's abstracted away from the HTML that webrat deals with. Writing a Cucumber feature helps me understand what I have to do in the same way writing an XP story would, except that a Cucumber feature is executable.

I also think reading Cucumber features is a great way for new team members to come up to speed on what the application does.