One of the hardest things about test driven development is choosing how to slice up your tests. Do you do unit tests (trying to isolate one unit of code) or integrating tests (checking to see that it all works together to lead to some positive outcome)?
I guess you do both, but I still don’t have good instincts about what to do when. Zach Dennis responded to a post I sent to the rspec-users mailing list giving me some good advice about the test I wrote about here.
I’m starting to think my first test should really be to send an email and then see if it got there. Unfortunately, email takes minutes to deliver, and how long should the test suite wait? Maybe I should just give up on testing this component.
Tags: tdd
