:jasonrudolph => :blog

At RubyConf today, Stuart Halloway’s Refactotum workshop led to a brief but excellent discussion on the various approaches for testing private methods in Ruby. Ideas ranged from the typical solution of using #send (which won’t work once Ruby 1.9 lands) to Ryan Davis’s technique of simply making everything public. Evan Phoenix, on the other hand, suggested a solution that avoids the soon-to-be-brokeness of using #send while still allowing you to benefit from the inherent intent expressed by defining a method as private.

To demonstrate, let’s assume we have the following (admittedly contrived) class:

 
So how can we make sure that the private method is doing what we want, and do so while testing it in isolation? Why not temporarily define a new public method that simply passes through to our elusive private method?

 
Sweet!