The Art of Testing Web Applications

As the best practices of web frameworks have emerged in the past few years (e.g., MVC and ActiveRecord), we are now seeing the same evolution with Testing Methodologies. It just makes sense: as developers get intimately familiar with their application pattern, they can spend more time learning how to best test their applications.

This presentation will look at some of the new revolutionary testing methodologies implemented by Ruby on Rails.

The Ruby on Rails web framework comes with many traditional web framework testing methods. Any Java developer can appreciate unit testing, functional testing, and the importance of testing code in isolation.

However, with the emergence of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), a new testing methodology has emerged. With BDD testing becomes less about writing tests, and more about writing specifications and defining the behavior of your program.

We will take a detailed look at how Ruby on Rails implements BDD using a Ruby library called RSpec, and see a live demonstration of how it allows us to write incredibly readable and maintainable code.

Many other languages / web frameworks are following suit with their own BDD testing tools. We’ll take a quick look at JBehaive for Java, NBehaive for .NET, PHPSpec for PHP, and even JSSpec for JavaScript.

Attendees who come to this talk should walk away with a firm grasp of the concepts of BDD and how to implement it in their applications, and possibly come away excited about testing your own code. Sound unrealistic? Just wait until you see how much fun it is with BDD.

No, I’m not kidding.