As promised, we’ve just pushed out Episode 7. It covers the ins and outs of Ruby on Rails testing support, from the basic terminology, through the technology, and all the way to some of the current philosophies on the topic.

The Ruby on Rails community has recently discovered Behavior-Driven Development which is very cool, but I think a lot of mileage can be achieved with the technique it was spawned from, Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development (see the book of similar name).

For the new practitioner, getting any tests going is a step in the right direction. This happens to also be an area where the current literature for Ruby on Rails developers is growing stale, so we hope to add some useful content in future BuildingWebApps.com articles too.

If you have useful testing links or stories of how TDD saved your bacon, please let us know.

That’s a whacky title…

A few folks have asked if the next Learning Rails episode is still planned for next week given the overlap with our seminar preparations. The answer is absolutely! I’ll post again when it is out Monday, but in the next episode we are covering the basic concepts around testing in all of its various flavors. You’ll also have to excuse the coining of a new term…those of you who have known me for a while know I have a knack for naming things that become terms that just won’t die. In this case, after an explanation of Test Driven Development, I’m laying claim to the term for the opposite of “Test First Developers” being “Test After Developers”, as in “a TAD too late”. It probably isn’t clear where I stand on testing.

Although there is a lot of attention being cast on other “fill-in-the-blank” driven development, we’ll be sticking to simple testing and modest TDD coverage at our seminar. While I believe strongly in these concepts, the sheer quantity of new information for folks is overwhelming, and I want to keep with the general coverage of the overall getting started topic in an introductory course.