Rails unit-testing best practices

I've seen many Rails beginners feeling overwhelmed by the extensive amount of tools they can use to start testing their apps. This is a nice post for them, as it gives a good overview of some of those tools and how they fit together.

I would have written a different title though, because as the last paragraph indicates, the post recommends some tools but not best practices (which at this basic level would be things like: minimize the interaction with the database and external systems, extract duplicated test code to helpers, label your tests with descriptive names, etc).

Nice summary of one of the many different testing philosophies (this one happens to be very close to my own).

As an alternative, where you currently have:

  it { expect(client.active?).to be_false }

It might be even more idiomatic to write:

  subject { client }
  it { should_not be_active }
  # etc.

...beautiful!

I am the author of that post, feel free to ask any question or give feedback :)