I’m just starting to use RSpec for Rails instead of Test::Unit, and with it comes a little novelty: there are separate Controller and View tests (unlike TUnit’s functional tests). At first I thought “hm.. cool”. But after spending the first hours writing tests for views I started to feel very stupid, and the whole thing feels very awkward and unnecessary.
Views are too unstructured and change too often for it to be worth keeping it all tested, and most of the time you’re not testing Ruby code, but HTML, and I don’t think that’s what tests are for. If your controllers are well tested, views should do OK.
As convinced as I am about this, I was feeling a little guilty to just ditch testing like that, so I searched for some supporting opinion and found this post. It agrees with me, so it must be right :) The comments are also interesting. The main idea is that you should just test if the views render without errors and get on with life. Now I just have to find out how to test that little thing.
