

"People writing Rails apps without tests are idiots." - pius
http://kurt.karmalab.org/articles/2008/02/07/rails-app-without-tests-guaranteed-fail

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mberning
Does everybody that ever worked for thoughtworks automatically become a self
important blog jockey?

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kschrader
Yes, apparently. What's wrong with writing a blog again?

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ericwaller
Unit testing isn't a bad idea, but it's not an incredibly prolific one either.
Maybe I haven't gotten the proper intro to testing, but what I've seen (mainly
in rails blog articles) is a joke. If I'm going to test a function I want to
test the entire domain of inputs -- assertEquals(square(2) , 4) is totally
useless.

I'd be happy to have someone show me an example of a useful rails-related
test.

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awt
I know of rails app that was sold last year for a decent price that was
untested. Are the people who wrote it idiots?

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nostrademons
Probably yes, but they're lucky idiots. It's the buyer's problem now...

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menloparkbum
losers like this are why I quit using rails. well, that and the whole ungodly
slowness thing.

rails doesn't provide any facility for testing the stuff that is actually hard
to test - the frontend javascript/flash/ui layer. it makes it easy to test
stuff that shouldn't need testing.

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fendale
Software that doesn't need testing - that doesn't exist I am afraid.

The UI is a different ball game (and as browsers evolve it will continuously
change), and there are tools out there to solve it in some way or another.
With the Rails tests, at least you have confidence that your backend is
correct which is probably 80% of the battle.

Also, the value of automated tests in general is to give you confidence that
the small change you just made didn't break something else!

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nostrademons
I wouldn't test a pure CRUDscreen put-data-on-the-screen app. How would it
break? The app is basically a specification of the data you want moved from
database to the web page.

And with the apps I've worked on, about 80% of the battle was the UI. The
backend was usually pretty simple data storage. That could be because my
career has been largely UI-centric, but there are certainly apps out there
where the UI code is more complex than the computation itself.

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chaostheory
He probably could have written it better so it wouldn't have been inflamatory,
but this has been done for years now... this probably applies for all apps
beyond just Rails...

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factor
No shit, Sherlock.

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thomasswift
i guess i know a shitload of idiots...

