Congratulations!

I think starting everyone off straight out of the sandbox with some kind of testing habit is a great idea. Then there wouldn’t be a big leap you’d have to do later, it would just be how everyone does it. You’d think that after this much time with testing frameworks out there and proven to work (despite the small amount of extra upfront work) that this would already be religion, but we could start with Rails books for sure (if not programming classes in school). It’s kind of funny that Rails has stubbed out tests from the get-go but doesn’t emphasize it enough in the books. Were they afraid it would make it too DRY? :)

I just helped launch a website and our Cucumber/rspec test suite (imperfect as it is) not only gave us a fairly smooth launch but has been an invaluable aid in diagnosing unexpected (aren’t they always?) regressions in our codebase as we start to pile on more features and bugfixes. This is especially true if 2+ people start working on the same code.

Write tests so you can sleep at night.

If there was perhaps a book that would go through from the beginning and show the reader how to develop a Rails app from scratch using testing then it would be an accepted part of life. Too many people have shown examples of the short-term gains in Rails (which is great for pulling people in), but testing really demonstrates the long-term gains you can achieve by using Rails also.

I’ll try to find time and contribute to your blorgh project!