Rails Best Practices

Write ur own spec macros

Macro-writing is a great way to keep ur specs beautiful, compact & readable, & keeps specs writing fun. Macro-writing isn't rocket science, everyone can do it (almost, i think).

Writing specs for 3rd party declaratives

Using declaratives (eg. acts_as_authentic) provided by external libs is unavoidable in building a rails application. But testing 3rd party libs is surely not part of our work, yet how do we rest assured that these declaratives are called ??

Use nested step to improve readability of ur scenario

When a scenario has too many steps, it becomes hard to read & follow. Using nested step helps to clean up the scenario, & helps promote reusability of groups of steps, think of it as code refactoring.

Use 'Background' to consolidate common steps in a feature

Very often, we tend to repeat a number of common steps in all scenarios within a feature, to dry things up, as well as improve readability (helping reader to better focus the intent of each scenario), we can use 'Background'.

Use pickle & ur choice factory for data setup in ur cucumber features (revised)

Data setup is sometimes painful in features writing for cucumber. Use pickle & factory of ur choice to make it less painful.

Use I18n.localize for date/time formating

For reliable formatting of a date/time string in the desired language, use I18n.localise, Time#strftime can cause u unnecessary headache.