Spent three days last week hunting for mysterious bug which caused factory_girl factories randomly fail with Trait not registered: class message during full test suite run, but when you run all controller or model tests separately — everything is fine and all tests which were failing during full run worked perfectly.

At first I ignored this issue — I had just added two new factories, which coincidentally used class parameter in their definition to specify generated class explicitly, and I needed these factories to test code I was working on and I though that I’ll fix or just remove these factories later.

But as it usually happens it wasn’t simple as I thought. Suddenly I discovered that tests started failing with the same symptoms on common develop branch and not on only topic branch. And I broke tests already in two other places, so clean up was really needed.

First two days I spent trying to find out what happening in factory_girl internals using old-school print logging and later pry-debugger but without much success except that I was able to locate single spec file in spec/workers/ which caused failure of all consecutive factory calls. Then I started looking at git history trying to find commit which introduced this issue. Luckily, in spite of heavy rebasing and few backported commits, my master branch didn’t have this issue and I was able to pinpoint this to single commit. At first glance this commit looked almost innocent — it just extracted code from model and moved it to app/workers/. But there were two tests added to failing spec file and they were the tests which caused cascading failure of all remaining tests in suite. After reviewing the code under test I had found that real culprit was memory leak debugging code I quickly slapped in without running tests:

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  counts = Hash.new { 0 }
  ObjectSpace.each_object do |o|
    counts[o.class] += 1
  end
  counts.reject! { |_k, v| v < 100 }

It seems that FactoryGirl::DefinitionsProxy undefines all methods including class and method_missing in this class adds any calls as traits to factory so walking through ObjectSpace and calling class on every object wreaks havoc on factories.