I use TDD for building apps and love it. However, I also use Ruby and Rails for data integration projects that do not have screens. Currently, I write a primary method that has all the steps and make each work as I build the data integration routine. There aren’t any tests for these but I do write the result of the overall routine (success or error), any error messages or failed tasks, along with counts of what changed in the database.
I’m wondering if a TDD approach using rspec or anything else for building similar data integration routines would be beneficial. I’m struggling a bit with how it would apply since there aren’t any screens involved.
An example data integration project might be: pickup data from files in ftp, pickup data from api, merge the data, perform statistics, save results to db.
Any thoughts are appreciated