Chapter 2. Testing saves your bacon

This chapter covers

  • Introducing testing approaches
  • Test-driven development with MiniTest
  • Behavior-driven development with RSpec

Chapter 1 presented an extremely basic layout of a Rails application and an example of using the scaffold generator. One question remains, though: how do you make your Rails applications maintainable?

About the scaffold generator

We won’t use the scaffold generator for the rest of the book because people tend to use it as a crutch, and it generates extraneous code. There’s a thread on the rubyonrails-core mailing list where people have discussed the scaffold generator’s downsides: http://mng.bz/g33u.

The answer is that you write automated tests for the ...

Get Rails 4 in Action now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.