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Our rails development team tries to follow Continuous Integration. We have decided to adopt a policy of only committing features whose tests pass. Is that a good way to go on? Should I delay integrating with other one's features until my tests pass(Even if the partial part of the feature works ok)? Thanks in advance

Ramon Araujo
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The tests should pass--if you're running a CI server it'll just spam people with emails until they do. Without a CI server everyone else will have to figure out if those tests are "supposed" to fail. Boo.

Another option is to only check in tests for actually-written features; if you're using tests as an executable specification they wouldn't all pass until the entire app was done and nobody would be able to check anything in ever.

You may also be able to mark tests as "pending" or indicate they should be skipped, but remembering to un–pend/-skip them is often problematic.

Dave Newton
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    Essentially this. Your tests should always pass, and you should only commit what you have tests supplied for. Tests are there for a reason. – Mike McMahon Apr 24 '12 at 00:18
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The tests SHOULD PASS that's the reason why you are writing them in the first place, if for some reason one or more tests do not pass, it indicates that something went wrong (obviously) and you and your team should be working on the solution.

If the code were committed with test failures, spam mails blaming the programmer who did it, this way the next time he will pay more attention before committing code

I have heard one way to avoid committing code with test failures but I have not personally tested, it involves to have two repositories (it could be a branch), the theory behind is:

  1. The developers commits will target a branch, the purpose of this branch is just to guarantee that all tests pass, you should configure your CI server to build and run tests from this branch

  2. When all the tests pass in the branch, a merge should be done to the trunk, since everyone should be working on this branch the merge should be transparent and automatic

I repeat I have not tested this approach and in my opinion it involves more problems than it solves

Another alternative could be to add a hook to the commit event in your VCS and force to run all tests but this could be time consuming just to perform a single commit

As additional info you could check this response

https://stackoverflow.com/a/7110774/1268570

Community
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Jupaol
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I would wait personally to the test passes before I intergrate other features.

Ray
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