Ruby Quarry

  http://quarry.rubyforge.org

Introduction

Ruby Quarry is a developers testing and debugging suite. It features a literal-programming BDD specification system, and exception based assertion system, and a few other of useful QA tools.

Features

Specifications

Quarry‘s BBD system is uniqe in a few ways. First it utilizes Ruby‘s Execption system to catch Assertions which are defined via assertion functors. Eg.

    require 'quarry/assertion'

    4.assert == 5

Because 4 != 5, this expression will raise an Assertion exception. Quarry‘s Specification Runner class is thus just a means of running and capturing these assertions.

Quarry‘s Specifications themselves are simple text files, a practice of literal programming.

    Example Specification
    =====================
    Shows that the number 5 does not equal 4.

        5.assert! == 4

    But in fact equals 5.

        5.assert == 5

    QED.

If we run this specification in verbatim mode the output would identical (assuming we did not make a type and the assertions passed). If there were errors or assertion failures, we would see information detaling each.

As you can see I used Markdown for my spcecification. You can use almost any format you like. The only neccesary distiction is that desciption text be align to the left margin and all specification code be indented. Quarry also recognized headers, currently Markdown and RDoc style headers (We‘ll add Textile soon.)

We‘ll leave discussion of the merits of this system to another place. But it should be clear that this approach if especcailly conveniant, allowing documentation and specification to seemlessly merge.

Stubs

Quarry provides a flexible stubbing facility.

For now see RDoc API.

MethodProbe

MethodProbe (aka the Duck Hunter) can dip-down into a method and provide a read-out how it functions —known as a method signiture. MethodProbe is somewhat expiremental becuase it is runtime bound, so proper execution can not be 100% guarenteed. It can miss some parts of a method due to conditional branching (a probe can;t pretend to be false) and, albiet rare, it can also get stuck in an infinite loop a la the Halting Problem. Even so, it can be used effectively under controlled situations if used with care.

More to come .…

Copying

Quarry is distributed under the terms of the GPLv3.

README