What to test in Rails in controller/view/request/feature tests respectively? A best practice?

[fengye87 (Feng Ye)]

So I just started learning testing this week, when I scaffold something, Rails generates a lot of things in /spec folder. Some of them are clear, while the other remains gray to me even after Googling for two days. To name my confusions:

1. Controllers: unit test or functional test? Or put in another word, does it get to touch real model or stubbed one?
2. Controllers: do I test authentication or authorization paths, given that I unit tested policies (authorization rules)? Or should I just stub them out and only test normal cases (authenticated and authorized ones)?
3. Views: do I test them? I’ve been told both do and do-not, what’s the benefit or necessity?
4. Requests: is this where I put my integration tests? Do I need to test every corner case, coz it is a lot considering authentication and authorization even for simplest CRUD resources.
5. Features: so I guess I only test some major usage paths here right? What’s the boundary between feature tests and integration test?

Dying to clear my head out now, really appreciate your options!

[ZombieHarvester (Max)]

I’d highly recommend to look through the following. If you’re new to testing, i’d suggest to start with rails defaults: minitest and fixtures

Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec

http://railscasts.com/episodes/275-how-i-test

How We Test Rails Applications

7 Reasons I'm Sticking With Minitest and Fixtures in Rails | Brandon Hilkert

http://sam-koblenski.blogspot.ca/2014/06/rspec-or-minitest-how-does-one-choose.html

MiniTest: Refactoring Test Unit and RSpec back to version 0.0.1 by Jared Ning https://youtu.be/IHB__duBuT0

https://whatdoitest.com/getting-friendly-with-fixtures

[sublimecoder (Jared Smith)]

Also recommend these resources.

https://pragprog.com/book/nrtest2/rails-4-test-prescriptions
http://everydayrails.com/2014/01/15/outside-in-example-ruby-tapas.html
https://www.justinweiss.com/practicing-rails/

When do you drop down a layer in TDD?

I'm wondering when you drop down and write a controller spec, or a model spec. Do you let the integration tests drive this entirely, and let the error messages from the integration tests drag you through or do you write specs for each section of code individually? So you start with a integration test, and then move to a route spec, then a controller spec, then a view spec, the a model spec. After following the exercises it seemed like there was close to 100% coverage and at all of those type…

[treble37 (Bruce)]

These are all great resources. If I had to do it over and I was just getting into testing, the books I would read in this order are:

1. https://leanpub.com/everydayrailsrspec - It’s good for understanding the basics of RSpec and it’s syntax. It’s a great walkthrough of basic testing in Rails.
2. Rails 4 Test Prescriptions by Rappin - This is a bit more higher level and less syntax-oriented and goes into principles/guidelines (e.g., what to test in a model, what makes great tests). I’m currently reading this and finding it to be a great read.

[fengye87 (Feng Ye)]

@ZombieHarvester @Jared_Smith @treble37 : thank you all for these great resources, I’ll definitely look into them.