This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Agnieszka Figiel. Original Post: Integration tests in RoR 1.1 Feed Title: agnessa's blog Feed URL: http://blog.agnessa.eu/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: ruby and rails impressions from a beginner developer Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Agnieszka Figiel Latest Posts From agnessa's blog

While most of the community are over the moon about RoR 1.1 features and some even request an update of Agile Development With Rails from the authors, there’s an argument about improper naming of a new feature – integration tests.

Luke Redpath suggests to change the naming convention for RoR tests – stop referring to “controller unit tests” as “functional tests”, and rename the proposed “integration tests” to “acceptance/functional tests” (which actually are synonymous, but acceptance seems more widely used today).

While I couldn’t agree more with the first suggestion, the second one does not seem right to me. Acceptance tests are on the top of unit and integration tests (in the sense they complement them) by checking whether the application meets stakeholders’ requirements. The new RoR integration tests simply bring in the possibility to test multiple controllers, introduce a testing DSL in the form of custom assertions and allow multiple session handling in tests. While this makes it possible to test scenarios, it seems to me that it doesn’t make these tests black box/acceptance/functional. So even if “integration” is not the best word here, to me it seems better than “acceptance” anyway :)