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As a very, very long-time member of the Ruby community > an integrated RSpec-like test framework Please no. Please, please stop blindly just cargo culting RSpec into your projects. Minitest is included with the language and has all the assertions you might generally want. The only thing RSpec really "adds" is an insane and quirky DSL for the sake of "reading like English", which is a terrible misfeature. Most of the rest are terrible, terrible misfeatures as well. As an example, one of these misfeatures is built-in mocking. Mocking is great, you might think. Yes, mocking is a necessary evil in certain cases but it should be used very sparingly. What happens instead is that people don't bother to design their classes for easy testing and they mock the hell out of everything in order to make their code testable. So what's the problem? Tests are supposed to do two things: 1) discover bugs you didn't realize you wrote, and 2) allow refactoring where if the tests pass, your code is probably alright. Widespread mocking absolutely tanks both of these goals. Instead of testing the effects of code, 90% of the Rails tests I see in the wild test mock everything to the point that the tests simply confirm that the code is implemented the way it is currently implemented. No bugs can be unearthed by this method because none of the actual effects are tested, just that certain methods are called in a certain order. And refactoring is now insanely difficult because any change to the logic causes the tests to fail, even if the effects are the same. This is just one example. So please, I beg you, stop reflexively reaching for RSpec. Minitest is great, it has most of the things you need out of the box. And Rails has a test framework built on top of it that similarly already does all the things you need. And it's all just plain Ruby. </soapbox> |