I’m going through his tutorial, which calls for the use of rspec. To make it through his tutorial do I need to do any of the rspec steps, or can I skip them?
More importantly, what is rspec, and what are the benefits?
I come from a very loose PHP world. I’ve never worked with a framework before, and all testing has just been manual testing on a local server before launching to production. I get the benefits of a testing application, I just don’t know that I’ll ever actually use it.
If you can convince me (not that I’m asking you to), I’m really good at following the path of reason and logic.
You can skip them by ignoring parts talking about tests.
I however strongly advise you to at least take a look at how it works.
If you want to develop a production site, being able to tell that your core functions are working as you expect them to is priceless (Cart management for an e-commerce website for example).
So each time you change something in your app, all you have to do is execute your tests and you’ll know that the core of your application works as expected (well, if you wrote good tests, that is).
If you don’t have tests, you’ll just end up losing time browser-testing every page when doing major modifications to your code base.