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Truthful: The Fifth Quality of Valuable Tests

Explore what makes a test truthful in Ruby on Rails by learning to create tests that accurately reflect the underlying code's behavior. Understand common pitfalls like brittle tests caused by surface-level assertions and tautologies with mock objects. This lesson helps you write more reliable, maintainable tests that truly validate your application logic.

Truthful

A truthful test accurately reflects the underlying code. It passes when the underlying code works and fails when it doesn’t. This is easier said than done.

Brittle tests

A frequent cause of brittle tests targets assertions at surface features that might change even if the underlying logic stays the same. The classic example along these lines is view ...