On 13 Apr 2011, at 02:48, Nicholas Wieland wrote:

> Hi *, the class I need to test is:
> 
> https://gist.github.com/49ef28014bb648ffa63e
> 
> I know my question is very generic, but I honestly fail to see how to test 
> something that is so strictly procedural and so dependent to the 
> platform/libraries.
> Should I mock/stub filesystem, services and pretty much everything that is in 
> there and test how it responds to different inputs, or adopt an "integration 
> style" ?
> How would you proceed in this case ? (you can refer to RSpec book and point 
> to parts that are relevant).
> 
>  ngw

It depends on what you're worried about breaking. It looks to me like the 
unpack method is the most likely one to go wrong, and the most likely one to 
grow with more cases, so I'd focus my effort on that.

You have about three distinct responsibilities going on in this class - there's 
something which sets up a directory structure, something which fetches zip 
files from S3, and something which unpacks a zip file into a folder structure. 
If you encapsulated what's going on in #sandbox into a Target or Destination or 
Sandbox class, with methods like write_stylesheet and and write_image, you 
could mock out that object easily. Similarly if you create a wrapper object 
around the responsibility of calling S3, you'd be able to test your unpack 
method with some fixture zip files from your test suite. The Sandbox and 
S3Fetcher classes will be pretty simple and unlikely to break, so you might not 
need to test them at all, other than with a quick manual integration test.

Depending on how mission critical this code is, you might want a simple 
integration test to check it all wires up, but that depends on you appetite for 
risk, how often this code will change, and where that change happens. If all 
you do is add more cases to the unpack method, you're going to be safe testing 
those changes with specs and running a quick manual test.

> 
> -- 
> [ 926381, 23200231779, 1299022, 1045307475 ].collect { |a| a.to_s( 36 ) 
> }.join( " " )
> Nicholas Wieland (ngw)
> n...@nofeed.org
> http://www.nofeed.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
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cheers,
Matt

--
Freelance programmer & coach
Founder, http://relishapp.com
+44(0)7974430184 | http://twitter.com/mattwynne

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