Autotest + Steak + Rails 3
Vitor Pellegrino
though i'm myself a vegetarian for a couple years, i decided to taste
a little Steak and i found this project a very interesting solution
instead of Cucumber i was used to use :)
Right now, i'm trying to get autotest to run my acceptance tests the
way as i could with cucumber. Does anyone has tried something like
this?
I've tried the steps described at this post, but without success
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975006/how-to-tell-autotest-to-correctly-track-changes-in-app-source
Does anyone uses this kind of environment with steak?
Thanks in advance!
Luismi Cavallé
I think you're not the first one trying to make autotest work with steak. Personally I never tried to do so and I don't know if it is possible out-of-the-box or if specific support from steak itself is necessary. All I can do is pointing out that ultimately a steak feature is just a rspec spec, so if there's any standard way to autorun regular specs (autospec?), that should also work with steak specs.
That said and despite cucumber supports it, I don't see much point in running acceptance tests with a tool like autotest. Acceptance test suites tend to be much more slower than unit test suites, so as your project grows, soon it becomes completely unpractical to autorun the whole suite every time you make a change in your application code. (Again, I've never been a user of autotest with cucumber, so please correct me if any of my assumptions are wrong)
For cucumber, there's a clever tool called cucover[1] that might help with this problem. It runs a feature only if it needs to be run based on the changes in the source files "covered" by the previous run of that feature. If such a tool would exist for rspec (and so, for steak) and if it'd work well, then running acceptance specs with autotest might make sense to me. Anyone interested in writing it? I would help.
[1] http://github.com/mattwynne/cucover
-- Luismi
Vitor Pellegrino
I didn't know cucover untill you pointed it out, i'll check it and see if i can find something like that for rspec. My idea was to run only the steak tests that are marked as "in progress" or something equivalent to that. In cucumber i could annotate my features as @wip (work in progress) so the autotest would (i'm not 100% sure, but i think it would) run only those who are annotated in that way.If something like that could be used at steak i think it would be fantastic.
I agree that acceptance tests run much more slower, but i like to running as much and as fastest as possible. Something like Sauron[1] does which parallelize your testing suite to take advantage of multiple cores whould be interesting for speeding those acceptance tests and making it more feasible to run it by autotest would be really neat to get integrated with my steak suite.
Well there are just ideas. I don't know if you guys like it, but if it's desired i could try to help get it written.
Thanks all :)
Vitor Pellegrino
http://vp.blog.br