Guard & Spork

Guard is a command line tool to easily handle events on file system modifications. It integrates with Growl, Terminal, and other tools that make development easy.

Spork is a DRb server for testing frameworks (RSpec / Cucumber currently) that forks before each run to ensure a clean testing state.

Together, Guard and Spork make an awesome Test-Driven-Development environment. Guard watches our files for changes, and Spork quickly runs the associated specs. When a spec fails, a growl notification is shown.

This process has significantly decreased the number of "bad releases" in our cycle. We don't have to wait 15 minutes for our test-suite to run, and we can instantly known when we break our application. It's like having a continuous integration server built right into your computer!