I am working on a ‘legacy’-ish app that unfortunately has a pretty slow test suite (10 minutes+).
I am working on some major upgrades to some dependencies, that require running the full test suite or a major portion of it iteratively lots of times. I’m starting with a bunch of broken tests, and whittling them down.
It was painful. I was getting really frustrated with the built-in rspec formatters — I’d see an ‘f’ on the output, but wouldn’t know what test had failed until the whole suite finished, or or I could control-c or run with –fail-fast to see the first/some subset of failed tests when they happen, but interrupting the suite so I’d never see other later failures.
Then I found the fuubar rspec formatter. Perfect!
- A progress bar makes the suite seem faster psychologically even though it isn’t. There’s reasons a progress bar is considered good UI for a long-running task!
- Outputs failed spec as they happen, but keep running the whole suite. For a long-running suite, this lets me start investigating a failure as it happens without having to wait for suite to run, while still letting the suite finish to see the total picture of how I’m doing and what other sorts of failures I’m getting.
I recommend fuubar, it’s especially helpful for slow suites. I had been wanting something like this for a couple months, and wondering why it wasn’t a built-in formatter in rspec — just ran across it now in a reddit thread (started by someone else considering writing such a formatter who didn’t know fuubar already existed!). So I write this blog post to hopefully increase exposure!
Bibliographic Wilderness 