Eloquent Ruby

Chapter 9. Write Specs!

The past few decades have seen the software world argue endlessly about the best way to develop reliable programs: Should our languages be procedural or object oriented or functional? Should we build things top down or bottom up or inside out? When we code, should we be rational, agile, or simply pragmatic? Out of all this discussion, one simple idea has emerged: If you want to know that your code works, you need to test it. You need to test it early, you need to test it often, and you certainly need to test it whenever you change it. It turns out that with programs, seeing is believing.

Unless you want to spend all your waking hours running tests manually, you need a test framework, a framework that will let the computer ...