Turns out I was wrong about RSpec subjects

I was afraid that David Chelimsky was going to take away my toys! Consider, explicit use of subject in RSpec considered a smell:

The problem with this example is that the word “subject” is not very intention revealing. That might not appear problematic in this small example because you can see the declaration on line 3 and the reference on line 6. But when this group grows to where you have to scroll up from the reference to find the declaration, the generic nature of the word “subject” becomes a hinderance to understanding and slows you down.

I’m so guilty of using subject heavily. Even worse, I’ve been advocating it to others too. In my defense, it does lend a good deal of concision to specs and seemed like a golden path.

Luckily, David isn’t taking away my toys. He’s got an even better recommendation: just use a method or let with a intention-revealing name. Here’s his example:

describe Article do
  def article; Article.new; end

  it "validates presence of :title" do
    article.should validate_presence_of(:title)
  end
end

This is, now that I’m looking at it, way better. As this spec grows, you can add helpers for article_with_comments, article_with_author, etc. and it’s clear right on the line that helper is used what’s going on. No jumping back and forth between contexts. Thumbs up!