Rails and RSpec over Lunch

ruby, software development, test driven development

With two small children at home I’ve lately been trying to get in about an hour of coding around lunch. These days thats Ruby on Rails and RSpec. I spent about half an hour today trying to figure out why RSpec was failing on the following:

"bob".should_be "bob"

Seemed reasonable especially since the following passed fine:

2.should_be 2

These were really simplified examples I came to after about the first 15 minutes. Turns out I found the answer by paying closer attention to the RSpec API. It turns out should_be calls the equal? method not the == method. Worked fine with:

"bob".should_be_equal "bob"

I’m enjoying trying out RSpec with Rails so far, though the startup time to run the specs is about 8-10 seconds on my laptop which is a bit annoying.

Ed Gibbs @ July 10, 2006