IN A NUTSHELL
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Learn how strategic test coverage is essential today to prevent breaking changes and reduce anxiety in ever-growing Rails monoliths, a common challenge in established applications.
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Discover how robust testing fosters developer confidence, streamlines onboarding, and enables crucial refactoring/upgrades without fear, directly impacting your team’s velocity and morale right now.
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Understand why comprehensive test coverage isn’t an overhead, but a long-term investment that proactively prevents costly production bugs and technical debt, making your Rails application more reliable for the future.
Introduction
You’ve just deployed a new production feature in your Rails app, then suddenly, you’re bombarded with error reports from a seemingly different part of the application. Have you ever encountered anything like this? You might be thinking: “How could this have happened? We have an automated test suite and manual testing has also been done by QA, so where did we go wrong?”
What Is Test Coverage?
You may have an automated test suite but it’s also important that the test suite covers most, if not all, of your codebase. It gives confidence that every feature of your product is always working as intended. However, a high test coverage doesn’t necessarily guarantee quality. Tests should be comprehensive enough to test not just the output of a code but also the code has done the necessary changes successfully.
Why Does It Matter? (Especially for Rails Monoliths)
Rails is famous for bootstrapping applications for startup companies. It easily provides everything that you may need to present a minimum viable product (MVP). However, Rails monoliths usually grow fast, which sometimes becomes chaotic. A single code change can break a seemingly unrelated part of an application.
A high test coverage helps your team catch regressions early and avoid production issues.
What Are the Pros?
Aside from the aforementioned reason for having a high test coverage, this also gives your team the confidence to refactor or clean up legacy code. Upgrading third-party libraries is easy because your team is confident that the automated test suite covers the entire application.
This also makes it easier for newly onboarded team members to understand the application better. The best documentation for your application is your automated test suite, and a high test coverage ensures great documentation for your product.
One of the embarrassing things that can happen to your product is when your users catch a bug in your application. They report it to you, expecting you to do better. A high test coverage mitigates this risk, as you catch the bug even before it reaches production.
Production deployment is usually one of the dreadful things that developers face. It can give anxiety, especially when your product is being used by a multitude of people worldwide. High test coverage gives your team confidence that everything is working as it should be.
What’s The Catch?
Test coverage isn’t everything. A 100% test coverage does not mean 100% bug-free. Focusing on just having a 100% test coverage can lead to low-quality, shallow, or brittle tests, if not done right.
How to Strike the Right Balance?
The aim should be a meaningful coverage of your application and not perfect numbers. Focus on testing the critical paths of your application. Ensure integrations are working as they should be, and that the business logic is followed for each and every scenario.
Conclusion: It’s an Investment, Not Overhead
A good test coverage is a long-term productivity multiplier, especially for Rails monoliths.
If you’re working with a Rails monolith and struggling with confidence in your releases, we can help. From audit to implementation, our team has helped companies unlock velocity with test coverage strategies that actually work.
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