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POWhen and how much should I test third-party code integration when practicing behavior driven development (BDD)?
 

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  1. POWhen and how much should I test third-party code integration when practicing behavior driven development (BDD)?
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    <p><strong>Context:</strong> I am trying to practice BDD in a Ruby on Rails environment using Capybara/Steak for integration tests, so that will be the example I use, but this question is a general question about BDD best practices.</p> <p>Say I have an (admittedly broad) user story like so:</p> <pre><code>Feature: As an administrator I should be able to manage my products </code></pre> <p>I have been looking at the <code>ActiveAdmin</code> gem for Rails 3, which allows you to create sophisticated admin interfaces using a simple DSL. While the time-saving potential is huge, it also scares me to off-load so much functionality to third-party code without testing at all.</p> <p>However, I've been taught that you generally only need to test code that you write yourself. So, by that logic, I just need to test that <code>ActiveAdmin</code> is integrated properly, since that's the only code I'm actually writing. A basic scenario to test this might be:</p> <pre><code>Scenario: Given I have 20 products When I visit the product index page Then I should see 20 products. </code></pre> <p>This is a function offered by <code>ActiveAdmin</code> out of the box. So I could do the basic installation and create the Products Admin page using <code>ActiveAdmin</code>'s documentation, and the scenario will pass.</p> <p>Of course, then I have also integrated a massive number of other scenarios, such as:</p> <pre><code>Given I have 20 products And my products include Apples, Bananas, and Berries When I sort my products by name Then Apples, Bananas and Berries should be on the first page in that order. Given I have 20 products And my products include Apples, Bananas, and Berries When I type 'ap' into the Filter by Name field Then I should see "Apples" And I should not see "Bananas" </code></pre> <p>etc. etc.</p> <p>Presumably though, these have already been tested by <code>ActiveAdmin</code> and so I shouldn't need to test them again, even though they are critical to my application. So I guess I'm done, and can move on to another feature(?).</p> <p><strong>TL;DR</strong>: My basic question is, <strong>should I be writing scenarios for critical functionality like sorting and filtering, even if they are already provided by an external library and I have tested my application's integration with that library?</strong></p>
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