I maintain the Smalltalk ports of the Fit, Fitnesse, and FitLibrary acceptance testing tools. These tools allow you to write acceptance tests for your software by using HTML tables.

A few weeks ago, I submitted a pull request to the minitest project. Ryan Davis (a.k.a. zenspider) merged my pull request, but also cleaned up the tests I had written. As someone relatively new to Ruby, I found his cleanup very instructive, so I’d like to share it with you. I understood everything he did, but I didn’t think of doing it that way myself. Being a Smalltalker, I understand quite a bit of “the Ruby way”, but Ruby has a number of unique features as well. I feel like I’ve learned the language and its features pretty well, but I still have much to learn about how and when to use those features to full advantage.

What Is the Bozo Bit?

I’ve long felt that the use of a lot of mock objects and other test doubles was a sign of a design smell. I would occasionally hand-build a test double for the rare case when I couldn’t find a better way, but I’d always look for a different option.

In object-oriented programming, it is common to extract a superclass when two classes share some common behavior. There are other ways to structure the code, such as using composition and delegation, but for this post, I’ll use inheritance.

I am Randy Coulman. I’ll skip the bio, but if you’re interested, you can read it on my home page.