Why Speed Is Important
Explore the importance of test speed in Rails test-driven development. Understand how faster test runs help maintain developer focus, prevent productivity loss, and enable more efficient test-driven workflows. Learn to identify test speed groups and strategies to keep feedback times short and relevant during application development.
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Speed as a measure of quality
Before we explain how we’ll use this information to speed up our tests, let me make a pitch for the idea of being a little obsessive about test speed.
We’re going to run our tests a lot.
If we’re doing the kind of rapid-feedback TDD that we’ve been discussing up until now, we’ll be running at least a subset of our tests nearly continuously, multiple times an hour. (Any exact number that we put here is going to seem shockingly high to people who aren’t used to super-fast test feedback and shockingly low to those who are). And we’re probably not the only developer on our team. Also, ...