Minitest is good for mocking, right? Well… Minitest is gaining a lot of popularity and can actually be a 100% replacement for RSpec. It’s a pure ruby testing framework, it’s fast, light weight, and it supports both a test-unit like syntax and a spec engine with Rspec like syntax. Still, when it comes to mocking, it can be a little painful. You have to initialize mocks and verify them manually after running the code under test....
Today I decided to verify if Machinist could be a good replacement for Factory Girl. In our project, we have a big problem with Factory Girl: even if you tell her not to hit the database, using the Factory.build method, if an object has associations, these are saved on the DB. And this causes a huge slowdown in specs using factories. We’ve been using Factory Girl for nearly two years, and if we could find a way to stop him hitting the DB, we could really have a huge improvent in our test suite running time....