Using shoulda to refactor rspec tests on Rails models

Question

After learning about shoulda-matchers by answering another StackOverflow question on attribute accessibility tests (and thinking they were pretty awesome), I decided to try refa

Answer 1

1) The Shoulda::Matchers::ActiveRecord module has a lot more in it than just column and index matchers. I would dig around in the included classes a little and see what you can find. This is where the have_many, belong_to etc come from. For the record though, I see little value in most of what is in there.

2) Yes, macros such as have_many test a lot more than whether or not a model responds to a method. From the source code, you can see exactly what it is testing:

def matches?(subject)
  @subject = subject
  association_exists? &&
    macro_correct? &&
    foreign_key_exists? &&
    through_association_valid? &&
    dependent_correct? &&
    class_name_correct? &&
    order_correct? &&
    conditions_correct? &&
    join_table_exists? &&
    validate_correct?
end

3) Making the tests more readable and/or concise is definitely a subjective question to answer. Everyone will give you a different answer to this depending on their background and experience. I would personally get rid of all of the respond_to tests and replace them with tests that have value. When someone looks at your tests, they should be able to understand the public API for that class. When I see that your objects respond_to something like "following?", I can make assumptions, but don't really know what it means. Does it take an argument? Does it return a boolean value? Is the object following something or is something following the object?