Keep Your App on the Rails with BDD – Part 1

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A common way to describe requirements on Agile projects is through the use of user story mapping, and, as a result, user stories. This post will not cover this process, but rather the process of taking an existing set of user stories and leveraging them within our development workflow to ensure that an application is built as accurately and efficiently as possible. To this effect, we will set up tools (Rails, RSpec, Capybara, FactoryGirl, and Guard, to be precise) for implementing our app using behavior-driven development. Structuring our app in this way gives us much better odds of producing robust, low-defect code that delivers on the requirements we set out to build.

Continuous Integration: An Overview

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Continuous Integration at Grio

In the same way that testing code is more and more becoming table stakes for modern software projects, continuous integration is increasingly becoming standard on projects of any non-trivial degree of complexity. Here at Grio, we leverage continuous integration whenever possible, in order to eliminate time spent performing routine deployments and tracking down integration issues.

Unit vs. Acceptance Testing (Part 2)

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By now, my post on unit tests influenced you so much that now you have 100% unit test coverage. But yet, some functional bugs still creep in and you still get the dreaded “It’s a bug because you didn’t build what I wanted” bug.

So let’s take a look at acceptance tests and how they can you help you improve your external quality and your compliance with product requirements.

Testing UI in iOS….and some Gotchas

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Most times in your application  a solid unit test trumps testing your UI. But that’s no reason to neglect your UI from having to endure the same rigorous testing you give your models. “But I don’t have time to sit around and tap every part of my application.”, you say. Enter Automation…

Unit vs. Acceptance Testing (Part 1)

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You don’t know the power of Test Driven Development

As a recent convert to Test Driven Development (or TDD as his friends call him), I was surprised to hear that there were in fact 2 kinds of developer driven testing.  The standard one that everyone knows of is unit testing:  writing little testXXX methods that test a single publicly exposed method.  But the lesser known – but just as important – are acceptance tests:  tests which verify that  a group of classes working together properly fulfill some functionality.

So this first post will take a closer look at the first type of testing, unit tests, and will go into the value it provides to you as a developer.