Cucumber Recipes

Recipe 13

Manipulate Time

Problem

You want to test a long-running process, but you don’t want your tests to be slow.

Ingredients

• Capybara^[87] for testing web apps in multiple ways, both headless and in-browser

• Timecop^[88] for faking the time of day in Ruby

• Sinatra^[89] for building the sample app

Solution

One of the biggest time sinks in testing is waiting on your app. Whenever a program has to connect to a slow network, make a lengthy calculation, or wait for a specific time of day, you can speed up your tests dramatically by finding a way around the delay.

In this recipe, we’re going to write a simple web app that has a fixed delay built in. We’ll start with a slow test that waits for the app to finish its task. We’ll then look at a couple of ...