A Las Ocho

Setup

$ bundle install
$ rake db:setup
$ bundle exec rspec spec

Dependency on QT

If bundle install blows up for you with something about QT, it's because we're using capybara-webkit for in-browser javascript testing in our acceptance tests. You need to have QT bindings in your system to compile the capybara-webkit gem. The latest instructions for getting this working should always be available at: http://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit

Tests

There are three different directories where tests are located:

spec
|- unit
|- functional
\- acceptance

Specs inside unit must not use rails. They should be true unit tests, use mocks for collaborating objects, and never depend on any external dependency. Not even rails. To that effect, you should require unit_spec_helper inside of those, which only gives you regular rspec.

Specs inside functional get access to rails' testing harness. Here you can test the integration of several models (and that the database works as you expect, or test several variations on controllers depending on certain parameters or if the user is logged in or not, etc).

Specs inside acceptance are expected to be browser tests. They get access to capybara and all that.

The idea is that:

amount of unit tests > amount of functional tests > amount of aceptance tests

And unit tests will be fast. Since they don't have to load rails, the startup time for these should not go over 1 or 2 seconds, and the tests themselves should be in the several hundreds per second range. If there's a slow unit test, then either the code sucks and needs to be rewritten, or you're using something external that you should be mocking.

Offline

Right now we require the following external services:

• Authentication: Either Twitter, Facebook, or Google
• Geolocation: due to constraints of heroku, we offloaded our geoip database lookups to an external service

We should probably work on making the app better at working offline, so we can work regardless of our connection status.