AFAIK, there is no framework or tool that can prevent people from doing
stupid things.

I actually only use pending for one thing: in the morning it reminds me
where I was heading the prior evening.
 On Jul 24, 2012 1:57 PM, "James Cox" <ja...@imaj.es> wrote:

> Yeah, I love pending too. but it doesn't help me get a sense of the
> state of a suite before I start. now it's part of my practice to go in
> and find out how much is commented out.
>
> David,
>
> three concerns with pending as an option:
>
> a. it won't help the people who think it's ok to comment out whole
> tests. If you make that choice it's not a good thing (™). I don't
> think there's enough evangelism in the world to change them.
>
> b. how do you distinguish between a pending and a broken-but-fixing
> test? one means, "i've got no coverage here, and i haven't thought
> about it' whereas the other says, 'i used to have coverage, and i need
> to fix it'. I know it's semantics, but that's important here: i need
> to know where no effort for testing has been made vs where testing
> existed (which may imply some domain knowledge which was at one point
> true).
>
> c. if you see # it 'should …' or similar, that's a commented test, not
> a test comment. This metric is always going to be loose… but it may
> give an indication, a sniff test. some kind of idea of what the state
> of a test is. It's the same as running rake stats - you and I know
> it's a bullshit metric (it can't possibly tell me how good the tests
> are), but it tells me at least if any effort to test has happened.
> Then, I run coverage and figure out how exercised the code is..
> somewhere along that line, it'd be good to know if there used to be
> tests but they are commented out.
>
>
> an anecdote… i experienced this recently with a project, and a
> significant majority of the tests were just commented out. They used
> to work, and a lot of it modeled the domain reasonably well - but
> either due to a breaking gem upgrade or a refactor or something - the
> original dev just didn't move/fix the test. So, on the face of it, the
> test scenario looked horrible, but in the end, for the key components,
> fixing the tests wasn't that painful. Regardless, I got a pretty fast
> sense of how much water he was treading at the time (or, how much he
> was under it :/)
>
> so yes, pending is ok, but a second keyword "broken" might be nicer,
> which would act the same but output different info.
>
> -james
>
> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:58 PM, Adam Sroka <adam.sr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I haven't posted in a while, but I want to say that as someone who
> spends a
> > significant portion of his time teaching (T/B)DD I am totally in love
> with
> > pending specs. There are analogous concepts in nearly every xUnit/xSpec,
> but
> > pending is by far the best. Kudos.
> >
> > On Jul 23, 2012 9:57 PM, "David Chelimsky" <dchelim...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 11:19 AM, James Cox <ja...@imaj.es> wrote:
> >> > Hey,
> >> >
> >> > in a bunch of the rescues i've recently done, I see a pretty big anti
> >> > pattern: tests don't work, and so rather than making them work, the
> >> > dev team just comments them out till 'later'.
> >> >
> >> > Does anyone think it'd be useful/interesting to get a flag for rspec
> >> > which would compare lines vs lines-commented, and if the percentage
> >> > was higher than xx, it'd issue some kind of warning?
> >>
> >> The pending feature is designed to help with this problem by allowing
> >> you to disable an example while still keeping it visible.
> >>
> >> If we were to do what you propose, we'd need to offer an opt-out
> >> and/or the ability to configure the percentage. Consider a suite that
> >> uses a lot of comments to annotate the specs. The problem with making
> >> it configurable is that the folks who's priorities lead them to
> >> comment out examples instead of fixing them will likely just disable
> >> this feature.
> >>
> >> I'd say, let's encourage people to use 'pending' correctly. WDYT?
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> David
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> rspec-users@rubyforge.org
> >> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
> >
> >
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>
>
>
> --
> James Cox,
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