Do you struggle with understanding what to test and how to test it?… Maybe you know that “you need to test the behavior of your objects”, but of those behaviors, what do you test?, and how do you test it?… are you looking for some kind of simple steps or methodology to apply? a repeatable process?

In the last years, working on several applications, I have developed a kind of “style” of writing my unit tests, that has helped me to reduce that anxiety of not knowing what to test or if I should test something or not…

So I want to share with you a template that I have extracted from my daily work to help you know what to test when you are creating a record on your App, and you want to write unit tests for it (the examples are in ruby but you can use them almost in every language).

You will be able to apply this template when you are…

• Registering Users
• Creating Products
• Registering Investments
• Saving a Post
• Adding Comments to a Post
• Adding a Task to a Project

you know, that kind of things…

This is the template that I almost always start with…

module Things
  describe "Create Thing" do
    it "has a form" do
      # Tests the form fields and default values.
      # (Only if you need a form to create the thing)
    end

    it "creates a record" do
      # Tests that the record was created with the right values.
    end

    it "returns success" do
      # Tests that when the thing was created successfully it returns a
      # success status.
    end

    describe "with <bad value>" do
      # When a bad value is passed

      it "does not returns success" do
        # Tests that it does not returns a success status.
      end

      it "does not creates the record" do
        # Tests that it does not creates the record.
      end

      it "returns an error" do
        # Tests that the right error is returned.
      end
    end
  end
end

Some times you will need to write more test for more complex behaviors, here is what you can do for some common cases…

• Complex default values

You can test them switching the it to describe and adding more examples.

describe "has a form" do
  example "<case 1>" do
  end

  example "<case 2>" do
  end

  #...
end

• Complex calculated values when the record is created

Also you can test them switching the it to describe and adding more examples.

describe "creates a record" do
  example "<case 1>" do
  end

  example "<case 2>" do
  end

  #...
end

• Different “Bad values”

To test them you can add more describe blocks.

describe "with <bad value>" do
end

describe "with <other bad value>" do
end

describe "with <other bad value>" do
end

I hope that this template can help you visualize better the things that you can test. Some times this template will not be enough but I think and hope it can help you in a lot of cases on your daily work!

Related articles

• Will it save the wrong value?
• How the turbo_frame_tag helper transforms an object to an html id?
• How to read the noCertificado from a CSD for a mexican CFDI
• Use after_touch to avoid to handle race conditions saving computed values