Rails - Aug 2012 - Diff-testing? (Acceptance testing for laziness and legacy-ness)

I''ve come across a pattern where I''m working on some system
without formal
acceptance testing, but it''s known to be good in its current state.

My favorite way to quickly get to a place where I don''t regress is to 
spider the existing system, then save its output in text form, in the 
repository (usually in a directory called `greenbar/`).

This is useful for web systems, capturing the HTML, but it''s also
useful
for any system that at some point passes through a flattened-to-text output.

I plan on either using or writing a more generalized system. Do you know of 
one, or should I go ahead and write it?


An example of a project that does this is here: 
https://github.com/exad/zu/blob/master/test/run

With almost no intervention the tests end up producing a pretty thorough 
coverage.


Of course, this does not replace more detailed acceptance testing, and 
certainly does not replace unit testing, but it can be a useful tool.

Thanks,
—☈

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A decent design would be:

- A gem that helps you manage the spider/diff/commit loop
- Gems that depend on that one to:
  - Use Capybara to help you spider web stuff better
  - Loop over invocations of CLI tools
  - Record various environments (that is, if you''re testing a tool
that''s
system-dependent, it would be good to be able to record the last time the 
run was snapshotted on various systems)

I have a few more ideas about it.

If you know of anything like this, or if you want to pair program on the 
creation of it, let me know.

—☈

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