Sime times you are stuck with realy badly written Rails project (or other application which comunicates with Database) which entire test suite takes ages to run. You want to run all the tests but you while they running you want to continue your TDD work.
If you run RSpec multiple times (multiple instances at a same time) you may break one of test suits because you will write data to same database both RSpec instances are comunicating with.
One way to handle this is if you run rspecs on different databases
# config/database.yml
default: &default
adapter: mysql2
encoding: utf8
reconnect: false
pool: 5
username: root
password: my_development_password
socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
development:
<<: *default
database: myapp_development
test:
<<: *default
database: myapp_test<%= ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'] %>
RAILS_ENV=test TEST_ENV_NUMBER=2 rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=test TEST_ENV_NUMBER=2 rake db:migrate
TEST_ENV_NUMBER=2 rspec spec/
If you are looking for solution how to run same test suite on multiple databases check https://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests
https://github.com/equivalent/scrapbook2/blob/master/archive/mini-blogs/2015-03-30-run-multiple-times-rspec-on-same-machine.md
