How well Rails developers actually test their apps

Here are the results of our State of Testing in Rails apps survey results. I have distilled the most interesting numbers for your reading pleasure and efficiency. Detailed charts here. I have highlighted what stands out as interesting for me. Number of surveyees: 142. Thanks for being one!

• 80% favor RSpec
• 79% find testing is inseparable from software development
• 54% say their app is well-tested
• 93% rely on unit tests
• 30% work with a project with over 100 db tables
• 33% work in a team of two or three
• 18% run a single test in “blink of an eye”, 46% under 5s
• 19% need more than half an hour to run the full suite on a development machine
• 86% run their tests on CI
• 15% wait longer than half an hour for CI result
• 60% are “pretty much” confident in their test suite
• 57% drop everything and fix the build, if it happens to fail
• 57% say their biggest problem with tests is that they take ages to run
• 39% never allow skipped test cases
• 83% say tests help them refactor code
• 23% say they mostly test their JavaScript code
• 73% use mocks, 72% stubs, 35% fakes
• 39% do not assess coverage, 56% use simplecov
• 32% do not aim for a specific coverage level, 31% aim for over 90%
• 17% often get frustrated by random test failures
• 32% just retry the build upon encountering a random failure
• 50% do TDD sometimes, 23% do often, 9% do always

Want to see detailed charts? Jump into this twitter thread. Also, it’s the best place to comment or ask further questions.