Working Effectively with Unit Tests Official Launch

Today marks the official release release of Working Effectively with Unit Tests. The book is available in various formats:

• DRM free pdf, epub, & mobi (Kindle) at http://leanpub.com/wewut

• Softcover at http://amzn.com/1503242706

• Kindle edition at http://amzn.com/B00QS2HXUO

I’m very happy with the final version. Michael Feathers wrote a great foreword. I incorporated feedback from dozens of people - some that have been friends for years, and some that I’d never previously met. I can’t say enough great things about http://leanpub.com, and I highly recommend it for getting an idea out there and making it easy to get fast feedback. 

As far as the softcover edition, I had offers from a few major publishers, but in the end none of them would allow me to continue to sell on leanpub at the same time. I strongly considered caving to the demands of the major publishers, but ultimately the ability to create a high quality softcover and make it available on Amazon was too tempting to pass up.

The feedback has been almost universally positive - the reviews are quite solid on goodreads (http://review.wewut.com). I believe the book provides specific, concise direction for effective Unit Testing, and I hope it helps increase the quality of the unit tests found in the wild.

If you'd like to try before you buy, there's a sample available in pdf format or on the web.

Rails: Clean up Controller Tests

Traditional Rails Controller tests begin with code very similar to the following code.

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

# Re-raise errors caught by the controller.
class SomeController; def rescue_action(e) raise e end; end

class SomeControllerTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

  def setup
    @controller = SomeController.new
    @request    = ActionController::TestRequest.new
    @response   = ActionController::TestResponse.new
  end

If you use generators you may not notice or care about all this boiler plate code; however, if you generally create your files from scratch you may be interested in the following method that I add to Object (in my test_helper.rb).

class Object
  def controller_tests(&block)
    full_path_file_name = eval "__FILE__", block.binding
    test_name = File.basename(full_path_file_name, ".rb")
    controller_name = test_name.chomp("_test")
    require controller_name
    
    controller = controller_name.camelize.constantize
    controller.class_eval do
      def rescue_action(e)
        raise e
      end
    end
    
    test_class = eval "module Functionals; class #{test_name.camelize} < Test::Unit::TestCase; self; end; end"
    test_class.class_eval do
      define_method :setup do 
        @controller = controller.new
        @request    = ActionController::TestRequest.new
        @response   = ActionController::TestResponse.new
      end
    end
    test_class.class_eval &block
  end
end

The above code does basically the same thing, but it allows me to define my controller tests in a much cleaner way.

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_helper'

controller_tests do    
  test "should display order number index" do
    get :index
    ...
  end    

  test "should create new order on new" do
    get :new
    ...
  end    
end

This change also provides the benefit of automatic test class renames when the test file name changes.