vcr VS Parallel Tests

Basically, it's a record/replay tool, similar to VCR for Ruby, but on steroids and powered by AI (khm GPT khm).

I don't think it's right to say "pythagora generates integration tests". It's more of a "replay manual tests as fixtured unit tests," which makes it similar to (but more powerful than) VCR for Ruby HTTP. What I've always wanted for these kinds of "request recorders" is a way to re-validate the test fixtures over time.

For example, they might expect to be able to mock calls to your API with something like VCR or Responses.

I also started from the same starting point but then discovered and started using VCR for creating http stubs - https://github.com/vcr/vcr. It allowed me to write against more realistic and complex test scenarios but didn't support databases.

If you had bit more complex workflows or less time - you could start using a VCR library to mock out API interactions and then continue with your dockerised DBs.

I generally will use vcr[0] or something similar to record requests and then I write tests and code against that.

3rd parties go down, it happens. In general a system that is dependent on a third party should have some non exceptional behavior when that happens.

So if I’m not setup with vcr, and 3rd party is down- I would on the behavior for what happens when it’s down.

[0] https://github.com/vcr/vcr

With external APIs, you can also make use of a gem like VCR. I prefer mocks (plus unit tests around the actual deserialization of the response) to VCR in most cases, but the end result is about the same.

A way to avoid this is using the VCR gem.

We'll use a tool called vcr to capture real HTTP requests and responses, storing and using them from then on. VCR's language and terminology leans heavily into its real-world analogue. If you don't know what a VCR is, it's a box we used to hook up to TVs to watch movies before DVD players. If you don't know what a DVD player is, it's a box we used to hook up to TVs to watch movies before streaming.

[1] https://github.com/vcr/vcr

Thanks for that feedback. For some more context, the container is designed to run 40+ processes in parallel sending remote instructions to AWS Device Farm for testing, so I suspect that the RAM usage is expected in this case. If you have any recommendations on re-architecting the execution here I'm all ears.

I know changing from RSpec to MiniTest requires some changes on how you organize the tests and how you think about writing them, but I found that I like MiniTest better after using it for more time, I think it goes straight to the point and it's better integrated (don't quote me on this, but I think minitest handles parallel tests better than RSpec in Rails app because that feature was added with mini test in mind, you would need to add an extra gem for rspec for that https://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests)

Several members of our team worked together to get the parallel_tests gem working for our codebase. Most of our tests were fine running in parallel, but we found enough that made assumptions about the order they would be run in that we had to do some fixing and rewriting. We kept this work in a feature branch, and kept chipping away at it until all the tests would pass.

Let's get one thing out of the way. If you use RSpec rather than Minitest, you are out of luck. RSpec does not support Rails 6 built-in parallel testing. There is an ongoing discussion about changing that, but there hasn't been any significant progress for a while. If you want parallel tests with RSpec, your best bet is still using third-party gems such as grosser/parallel_tests.