Test data and seeds

• Intro
  • Data or objects that exist exclusively for testing
  • Sometimes known as test or seed data
  • Also known as ‘fixtures’
  • What is the role of data in developing tests for your application
• Where are they stored?
  • in memory (i.e. objects and classes)
  • on disk (i.e. files, images, …)
  • in a database (i.e. records in a dbms)
• When are they created?
  • At “build” time, i.e. putting files in the right directories or adding records to an empty database
  • At “launch” time, i.e. when the app launches it creates the fixtures
  • At “test run time”, i.e just before the test needs them
• Tooling
  • In rails, we have “seeds” and “fixtures” built in
  • In sinatra, just seeds
• Mocks
  • Let’s look at some of the code that runs this web site.
  • Note slightly different syntax because of RSpec vs. minitest/spec
  • citem_spec.rb
  • toc_spec.rb