RSpec

RSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for Ruby and is used in many large Ruby/Rails projects. If you've used Jest in JavaScript, the syntax may look familiar. With RSpec, we write tests to ensure our code is doing what we want it to.

Set up

Installing Ruby

To install and manage Ruby, the best bet is to use rbenv. Follow the installation steps in their repo, then run rbenv install in this directory and rbenv will install the required version of Ruby for you.

To get this ready to go on your machine, run the following command to install the gems required

bundle install

To run the tests, we use

bin/rspec

Run this now — you should see a failing spec in the spec/noughts_and_crosses_spec.rb file. If you want to run a specific file you can pass that to RSpec

bin/rspec spec/noughts_and_crosses_spec.rb

# Alternatively, you can run a specific line within the spec file...
bin/rspec spec/noughts_and_crosses_spec.rb:9

Instructions

Your task is to create a class for playing Noughts and Crosses. We've given you a skeleton to start you off and a basic test file to fill in as you go along. The initial skeleton is simply a template and you're free to change it as you see fit!

There are some requirements that this game should handle:

1. A new game can be started at any time;
2. A player may enter a move which updates the board;
3. The game reports if a move is invalid (e.g. a piece is already in the position);
4. The game can be queried to find out if the board is in a winning position and
5. The game can report which player has won.

Further remarks

For solving this problem, you may wish to engage in pair programming by taking turns to write tests and code between each person. For instance, one person writes a test for the other to code against, then they swap. Some tools for enabling this remotely include the Live Share plugin for VS Code, Teletype for Atom, Pop or even ssh+vim (hard mode).

There are multiple ways to represent a game board; you may wish to use a multi-dimensional array or write a dedicated class for it. Try both and see which fits better!

You may wish to have your game say whose turn it is after each move (i.e. swapping between noughts and crosses), but this is not a requirement. If you'd prefer, you can have the player pass in which piece they're making a move for.

It's not a requirement to add a method to render the grid in a user-friendly manner, but if you've got time left over, you may wish to do this. When coming to test a printing function, RSpec has a few test methods relating to output. Have a search for them and try to use them to make testing easier!