I thought I'd start a series of short blog posts on things I remark on during code review that could be of wider interest.

Do you see anything to improve in this extract from a feature spec, assuming we're fine with doing assertions against the DB?

fill_in "Title", with: "My title"
click_link "Create item"

item = Item.last
expect(item.title).to eq "My title"

What happens if item is nil? The test will explode on the last line with NoMethodError: undefined method 'title' for nil:NilClass.

If we would instead do

item = Item.last!

then it would explode on that line, with ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound.

That's a less cryptic error that triggers earlier, at the actual point where your assumption is wrong.

Active Record's FinderMethods also include first!, second!, third!, fourth!, fifth! and forty_two!.