Onboarding: Testing

Testing is a weak spot in this code base, compared to best practices:

For the Ruby/Rails part of the code:

• You can run the existing test suite with rake test
• You can run a single test file with rake test TEST=path/to/the/file.rb
• We are using minitest test framework, which is built into rails, rather than the more popular rspec framework (which is what most tutorials cover.)
• There are relatively few tests.
• The tests mostly use fixtures for the test objects, which can be confusing and unreliable. A few newer tests are using FactoryBot, which is a more reliable way of setting up tests objects.
• We don't have any measures of test coverage set up.
• We don't have any tests set up for the API part of the backend that supports the React front end

For the React side:

• You can run the existing tests with yarn jest
• We have test coverage set up via yarn run coverage, but the coverage levels are below 5%

End to End testing:

• We have a minimal start at doing full end-to-end black box testing via Playwright, but it's only a proof-of-concept; it hasn't yet been integrated into our practices.

Work to be done

Rails side:

• Migrate tests using fixtures to use factory bot instead
• Add some way to compute test coverage for rails code
• Add tests for API for the backend that supports the React code
• Add Rspec support side by side with minitest
  • This article may help
• Migrate tests from minitest to rspec

React side

• Add tests for uncovered components (but first make sure the component is really being used or needed.)

End-to-end (Black Box) testing:

• Add more meaningful tests that use playwright. This will likely involve dealing with a number of challenges, including, but not limited to, handling authentication, and database issues.