Today I learned how to use rspec, the Rails plugin. It was my first experience with unit testing, and it seemed eerily familiar.

You know when you write a class and then instantiate it and throw a couple of curveballs at it just to make sure it works? And then you write a related class, and throw both of them in the air for a few compiles?

That’s it. That’s what unit tests do. I had read a few tutorials on it, but their simple data class examples weren’t vivid enough to help me make this connection to my own practice.

It’s turning my stomach a little to realize how much time I’ve wasted. Informal unit testing is hugely inefficient. With informal unit testing, your little experiments are pretty much tossed into a big dark ditch. With formal unit testing, you can always run them again, which is priceless when you make a modification and need to make sure nothing has been broken. I get that now. Amen.

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