Cut down on those objects to speed up your cucumber tests

Chances are that a big reason your tests are so slow is all of those extra objects you are creating. Recently I cut down on the objects in my tests and I was able to speed up by cucumber runs by 30-40%. I achieved most of those gains by making some small changes to factory girl. I don't want to bore you with the detail of our object model but it goes something like this. Our main object is a space and our tests frequently create several of them. The problem is that a space has a reference to a user, property, an contacts. Each of those actually have references to other objects. Just by creating a few spaces we end up creating a web of objects but our tests didn't need all of these extra objects. Enter the default objects within our factory_girl definitions:

def default_user default_email = 'default@test.com' User.find_by_email(default_email) || Factory(:user, :email=>default_email) end def default_property street_address = '5555 5th Ave' Property.find_by_street_address(street_address) || Factory(:property, :street_address=>street_address) end def default_space floor = "99th-98th floor" Space.find_by_floor(floor) || Factory(:space, :floor=>floor) end factory :space do property { default_property } user { default_user } suite { "##{Forgery(:basic).number.to_i}" } floor { Forgery(:basic).number.to_i } rental_rate { Forgery(:basic).number * 100 } description { Forgery(:lorem_ipsum).words(rand 100) } space_available "25,000 sq ft" availability_type "arranged" status 'active' end

Instead of creating new properties, users, and contacts each time a space is created, by default all spaces share the same nested objects. Most often this is not at all a problem in any of our tests. If we do require spaces do not share the same property, we specify it the Given section of our test.