# Best Practices for Rails Web Application Testing?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-rails-web-application-testing/158927>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 29, 2009, 2:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-rails-web-application-testing/158927 "2009-01-29T14:41:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![armstheykill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/a587f6/32.png) [@armstheykill](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/armstheykill)\
**Post date:** [January 29, 2009, 2:41pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-rails-web-application-testing/158927/1 "2009-01-29T14:41:33Z")

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Hi all,

I am going to paint a probably familiar scene. My first rails project  
was a supposedly simple web application, which has now been under  
development for 2 years, has expanded to about 12 models, and is a  
full blown web application.

As a newbie to ruby and rails, I paid exactly zero attention to  
testing at the beginning, and as a result, I probably have over a  
thousand lines of code now, and zero lines of test code. I realize  
the error of my ways, especially now that I am tracking down a very  
elusive bug, and I would even like to move to a TDD/BDD model with my  
idea guy.

The problem that I am facing is twofold: first I’m not a software  
developer in real life, so I don’t have much exposure to the “testing  
world” in the first place. I had to look up the difference between a  
unit test, a functional test, and an integration test. But beyond  
even that, I am having trouble understanding the “state of the union”  
as far as testing rails web-apps is concerned. There seem to be so  
many different products, and I don’t really understand which ones test  
what, and how much testing is required. Where do they overlap?

I’m aware of the built-in testing functionality, but I’m reading that  
people are using that less and less. Then I read about rspec and  
cucumber. Cool stuff, but does it _replace_ testing with the built-in  
Test::Unit?

I read the series of posts here:  
[http://blog.rubyyot.com/2009/01/chores-a-test-driven-website/](http://blog.rubyyot.com/2009/01/chores-a-test-driven-website/)  
and what I came away with was that something like cucumber is good for  
functional testing, but unit testing should still be done with  
Test::Unit. And that it is important to keep the two roughly in  
sync… as cucumber drives your development of new units, be sure to  
test them with the built-in testing as you go.

Comments or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Am I on the right  
track here?