Full stack testing

or: How to ensure a proper conversation with your Rails API

"Ordinary" Tests

Run within the same process as the server and therefore "see" things an ordinary client would not

Run in a Database Transaction and are rolled back before any actual database storage is done

Since we need to test from another process, we cannot use these transactions (other processes don't see the data)

We need to check the actual behaviour, not an isolated unit - mocking and stubbing is not allowed

We cannot use the default Unit Testing strategies.

Instead, we use DatabaseCleaner and configure it to truncate all our tables after each test.

Then, we just store stuff in the database from our tests.

Baked authentication into our testing "framework" => move complex setup away from tests themselves

Make descriptions match your documentation

By reneb