There are now almost 1000 entries in the main resource for Ruby on Rails plugins, Agile Web Development’s Plugins Directory. Of these, 596 have repositories listed that are accessible. I wanted to see how many of these plugins came with some form of tests, so I created a spider (using a web spider library) and performed some basic analysis on each repository.
After reading a few magazines, and watching two entire TV shows, the spider came back with a result: 54% of the plugins have tests.
It’s amazing to …
This article is an introduction to testing Rails plugins. It’s a relatively lengthy post, so if you’re reading this in an RSS reader flag it and come back when you’re not too busy. It follows the “taxonomy” style of my previous plugin article, A taxonomy of Rails plugins, where examples are used from open source software.
Knowledge of both unit and functional testing is assumed. The following topics are covered:
