WHY RUBY ON RAILS?: How the right software choice can save you a ton of money. by Mikel Lindsaar

Author:Mikel Lindsaar
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: reinteractive
Published: 2017-07-13T07:00:00+00:00

Testing Built In — Rapid Development

This is an often overlooked aspect of software development, though with recent movements such as Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development it has been given more of a spotlight.

Ruby on Rails has a comprehensive, easy to use, automated test system built into the framework structure.

Automated testing means that as developers build the features, they also write an automated test that runs the application in such a way to ensure that feature works now, and into the future.

For example, say you require all users to have both a given and family name specified. The developer would write a test that tries to create a user without a given and family name and the test would check to make sure the system does not allow that to happen.

In the future, someone decides to alter this behaviour for another feature on the system, say for a newsletter sign-up where you only need an email. This might be months or years into the future, and the new developer has no idea about the requirement for given and family names when the system was built, however, when she makes the change, the automated test suite will fail, pointing out that given and family names are required fields.

At this point, the developer can talk with the stakeholders and either fix the newsletter sign-up feature so it also requires given and family names, or change the test because it turns out that the business has changed and the names are no longer important, or find another way to handle newsletter sign-ups.

In any of those 3 options though, the result is the same. An automated test found an issue that if left un-confronted may have resulted in broken software being deployed to a production environment that could have prevented users from signing up correctly.

This simple example highlights how automated testing works. But the real benefit comes when future developers are employed to update your software.

You could imagine that after months of developing, the system would have hundreds, if not thousands of automated tests, checking all the features developed. Every time the code is changed, the tests are run, and if all the tests are green the developer has a high confidence that their new code hasn’t broken anything critical.

This allows you to rapidly bring onboard new developers whenever needed. A new developer who gets your application source code and runs the tests and sees that there are a very significant number and that they all pass, instantly has high confidence that the application is well maintained and well written.

Further, they can get cracking immediately on writing some new feature, confident that if they do something wrong, the test suite will show them what broke and they’ll be able to rapidly resolve it – increasing productivity. The “best practices includes testing” approach in Ruby on Rails is a highly compelling reason alone to use

the platform.

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