Learn how to test Rails using Test::Unit instead of Rspec

I don't agree at all with this premise by the OP:

> Just from skimming over the tests, it’s obvious that Rspec is more readable. The Rspec DSL was designed for us humans to be able to understand what is happening at a glance. This is where Rspec gets my vote. Unfortunately, we aren’t talking about reading or sharing tests. We are talking about writing tests, and this is where Rspec has a heafty learning curve.

I think the MiniTest::Spec API is both easy to read and write...(I'm assuming the OP is criticizing both Rspec and MiniTest::Spec here). I'm just saying this from personal experience, as I learned both the Spec and standard testing syntax at the same time.

    describe 'Article' do
      let(:article) { Article.new }
  
      describe '#slug' do
        before(:each) do
          article.title = "Testing with Test::Unit"
        end
  
        it 'does not contain non-alphabetical characters' do
          article.slug.should_not match(/[^\w-]/)
        end
    
        it 'does not contain capital letters' do
          article.slug.should_not match(/[A-Z]/)
        end
    
        it 'replaces spaces with hyphens'
      end
    end

First I tried testing models and controllers, skipping views. Now I use integration tests with Capybara because it effectively tests the whole stack without writing redundant test code.

What's not clear is the pros and cons of each approach. Over time you end up using your own approach that works best for you. It's one thing to know that you need to "test your code", but with all the various testing libraries created, it can quickly become overwhelming.

In an ideal world, I'd like to learn more about the various approaches. Test::Unit vs Rspec, vs all the additional testing add-ons and how everything works together. When you end up spending just as much time writing tests as you do writing code, you quickly realize how critical getting the right approach to testing really is.

I just started the process of converting our few hundred Test::Unit tests to Rspec simply because Test Unit documentation is terrible. Our tests need a lot of work and I'm not that experienced at writing test scripts. I have to learn this as I do it, and I struggled to find resources for learning Test::Unit.

Every blog post, tutorial and guide I can find was written for Rspec.

As much as I'd love to continue using Test::Unit and save myself the hassle of converting from one to the other, I found learning Test::Unit to be one giant brick wall after another.

No one is discussing it, no one is blogging about it, no one is writing stack overflow questions about the issues. (I say, in a discussion about a blog post about it... but this is the exception not the rule, sadly)

For me it was a simple decision: If I want community support, I need to be using the tool the community is actually supporting.

(Not that Rspec documentation is that much better-- I've now resorted to just reading public github repos and looking for spec/ directories to scrutinize and learn from. If anyone has links to any good repos that use rspec tests, I'd love it if you could send them my way! I need more good repos to learn from!)