BDD on Rails - Is the community more behind Shoulda or RSpec?
- by Wayne M
For a new application I want to start dabbling in BDD and I'm trying to decide between using RSpec or Thoughtbot's Shoulda. I like the macros that Shoulda uses, and the fact that it doesn't seem to reinvent the way Ruby/Rails does testing, but simply provides an add-on. On the other hand, the macros seem like a bit too much "magic" instead of being explicit about what you're testing (however I know from dabbling that it's annoying to write a dozen "should be invalid without xxx" two-liners on a model). To be honest I find writing specifications/tests for models to be trivially and almost boringly easy, but I find writing them for controllers to be insanely difficult because I'm never sure exactly what I should be testing or how to write it.
I'm iffy on the subject of mocking and stubbing since I think they give you false assumptions (since you can just tell it to think it has whatever data you need or to pretend that Method X was called) and I know that RSpec makes heavy use of both of them. I like the documentation that RSPec produces but I'm creating an application for sale, not to give to a client so the pretty documentation isn't that useful. I like Cucumber but it seems like overkill (and yes I know it can be used with Shoulda).
At this point is the Rails community in favor of RSpec or Shoulda?
