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"People writing Rails apps without tests are idiots."

kurt.karmalab.org

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: "People writing Rails apps without tests are idiots."

#11
post #7

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.

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 s…

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.

Re: "People writing Rails apps without tests are idiots."

#17
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.

Re: "People writing Rails apps without tests are idiots."

#19

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.

We test our front end using Selenium across multiple browsers every time we do a build.

I guess we'll just have to disagree on whether or not there's software that doesn't "need testing"

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