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Smells and patterns in test/spec code by Sidu ponnappa and Aninda Kundu

526 views · Published 20 May 2012 · 41:17 · Indexed 11 October 2026

Channel: Confreaks · 2012 · Science & Technology

The Ruby community is notable for it's whole-hearted adoption of Agile and XP, especially testing; testing is now a standard practice on the vast majority of Ruby codebases. TDD is commonly recommended because:

It makes for good design, helping one create well encapsulated, decoupled production code
It provides documentation for production code
It minimizes regression issues and makes bugs easy to diagnose and fix
What is rarely discussed is the fact that a test driven codebase exhibits patterns and smells in test code just like it does in its domain code. These test smells are as useful in identifying quality issues as are, say, violation of the law of Demeter in domain code. This talk will cover some of the common patterns and smells that a test driven codebase exhibits and their implications.

Some of the patterns/smells we will cover include:

The long test file
The test with too many assertions
The test that cannot fail
The test that has logic
The implementation bound test
The test with arcane terminology
The test that verifies program flow
The slow test
The test that has complex setup
The test that shows high churn
The test file that shows high churn

Smells and patterns in test/spec code by Sidu ponnappa and Aninda Kundu

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