rictic

I’ve been looking into and adopting Test Driven Development lately, and I’ve run across some neat tools that can improve the TDD experience a good deal. stakeout is a program that utilizes some native OSX tricks to run a script every time a file is changed.

I wrote a bit of ruby (along the lines of gstakeout) that ties together the OSX notification manager Growl with Ruby’s unit testing framework. It’s just a little hack that adds a couple of lines into the command line test runner of unit/test, but I found it to improve TDD on little projects so much that I made a short screencast showing it off:

This could be improved by integrating it into autotest, which has the nice property that it only tests methods that need to be tested.

edit: Usage: Add this to the end of your test script:

require 'growlrunner'
runner = Test::Unit::UI::Growl::TestRunner.new(YourTestClassGoesHere)
runner.start

If you do this, it’ll work with autotest, and in Rails projects.

Requirements: RubyCocoa
Download growlrunner.rb (updated 5-2-2006)