I always thought cucumber was, well, cumbersome. I stick with Rspec, which you could argue saves time. The 5:1 ratio mainly hits when testing models, especially

I always thought cucumber was, well, cumbersome. I stick with Rspec, which you could argue saves time. The 5:1 ratio mainly hits when testing models, especially scopes. Maybe the problem is that I've written tests for all validation, attributes and scopes. For a model, that can be a dozen lines of code, but for the test suite, it could be hundreds. I do you Shoulda and I don't do controller/view specs (so not mocking/stubbing). I do integration (i.e. request) specs. I've always had a problem with testing view output like you mentioned e.g. I should see "You are signed in." I'm always making last-minute copy changes, and sometimes would make a change like this to "You are logged in". It's a very simple change, but potentially could break some specs. I'd have to run the suite, see what failed, look at the line numbers, figure out why, then realize it wasn't that my app wasn't functioning properly, but the assertion was tied very closely to a transient message. Again, maybe this is just isn't a good way to test. I'll agree on refactoring. Nothing is scarier than going in and changing internals, hoping nothing breaks.