Editor’s note: Please check out the much newer article Configuring Travis CI on a Puppet Module Repo for the new “best practices” around setting up rspec-puppet. You are encouraged to use the newer setup, though everything on this page will still work!
Over the course of the Puppet series, one thing I’ve ignored is testing. As vSphere admins, many of us are comfortable with programming but probably not as well versed in some practices as full-time developers. Today we’ll look at an introduction to some test-driven-development with puppet.
Test Driven Development
What is this Test Driven Development, or TDD, that everyone speaks so highly of? In essence, you write tests that fail before you write any code, then you write code to satisfy the tests. Each test typically looks at a specific unit of functionality of a program, such as whether a file is created or has contents, and are called “unit tests.” By testing a specific function, when you have a failure, you can typically narrow down the problem domain to a few lines of code. When all unit tests generate successes, your code works (in theory!). In addition, when you modify the code in the future, these unit tests help ensure that you haven’t broken something that was previously working, also known as a “regression.”
TDD depends, of course, on writing tests that both provide coverage of all your code and that map to the requirements of the program. If you forget to provide a test that covers a vital portion of your code, all your tests can be successful but leave you with a broken program. If you have not been practicing TDD on an existing program, you can still add tests. However, you will not have 100% test coverage (the percent of code that is covered by unit tests) initially, or possibly ever, as all of the existing code was written prior to the unit tests. To keep things simple today, we’ll start writing some new code.
rnelson0 