thirdbIT

Max and I are trying to learn how to write tests for our rails apps. Like many things in rails, testing seems intuitive to those who understand what’s going on already, but people who claim there’s no learning curve are deluded. The first three times I opened up my test directory and started trying to write test code, I grew incredibly frustrated and confused and gave up. “What’s assigns() do? How do I write my fixtures? Why do I always stick my colon in the wrong place when going back and forth between yaml and ruby code? What should I be testing anyway?”

“Who needs tests?” I thought. “That’s what QA is for! No one can figure this stuff out! I have no frackin’ clue what is going on here, and I never ever will.”

But I kept trying. When Max and I sat down this morning to write tests for our current project, we quickly grew, yes, frustrated and confused. We snapped at each other. Max squinted a lot, and I pointed accusingly at the screen a number of times. “See! See! Do you SEE what we are doing here?!” We couldn’t get one teeny tiny little test to pass. We wanted to do pretty much anything else.

But okay, we said. Learnd-ing is hard, as Ralph Wiggum (or a certain George) might remark. We are frustrated, but we will get it.

Eventually, we got our test to pass.

Now we just have about a zillion more tests to write, and we’ll be all set.