I wrote my first proper Unit Tests in Ruby today. It felt good.

That probably sounds slightly gauche and hypocritical coming from a Rails developer. But remember – I’ve come from a front-end background; most of the time, other people make the tests; it’s up to me not to break them. I’m perfectly capable of editing tests to bring them in line with updated functionality; it just tends to have been the case that I’ve never really got my head around testing properly.

That changed recently, mainly thanks to Geoffrey Grosenbach’s excellent Peepcode screencasts. I’ve read a fair amount on testing up to now – Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python is very good on the subject – but it was Geoffrey’s material that really clicked with me. (I’m watching his Capistrano one at the moment, and it’s certainly proving to be as good as the testing one).

I’ve always understood the point – and the utility – of test suites, but I’m pleased to have got my head around writing my own, starting with one (of several) projects on the back burner. Small steps at first, but it’s really satisfying to be working in a relatively test-driven manner.

And so I’ve been enjoying watching the dots fly by before those magic words come up: 0 errors, 0 failures. The Peepcode screencasts come strongly recommended, as well. Here’s to slightly more watertight code from now on.