From: Stefano Taschini <taschini.mlist@...>
Date: 2006-05-04T21:45:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Unit test setup

On 02/05/06, John Wilger <johnwilger@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> However, one of the rules of agile unit testing is also that the tests
> must be able to run quickly (so that people will actually bother to
> run them). Therefore, it is sometimes (though rarely, if you're doing
> things right) helpful to make sure expensive operations happen only
> when absolutely needed -- but you should only make this compromise if
> you can be absolutely sure that you're not introducing state
> dependencies into your tests.
[...]

You are absolutely right. In fact, this is exactly how it is done in
rails when using transactional fixtures (which is the default
setting):

TestCase#setup uses the class variable @@already_loaded_fixtures to
make it sure that the fixtures are loaded just once, whereas the
rollback mechanism in transactional fixtures prevents the state
dependencies that you mentioned.

Ciao,
Stefano