How should I be testing this situation?

I'm working with ruby, and I want to test the UI and general behaviour of a server that is in-production. These are strictly non-destructive tests, just to insure the program is working correctly with the database it gets attached to (in a way, it's testing both the site and the data)

I've been writing Capybara u开发者_如何学Pythonnit-tests, but there are obvious drawbacks of not being able to control the order of the testing, and with having to reinitialize all the testing data on my end each time. (I feed in a test specification file for this)

So, at best, I'd like to know what this sort of testing is called, if anything, and what I should be using instead of test::unit. I would think it would be integration testing, but it is clearly not Rails-style integration testing.

Alternately, a way to insure a given test or tests runs first (to make sure all the data is correct before doing the UI testing) would be good as well.

In this case you can write your own ruby script that uses Capybara and checks that everything is fine. In these case it is the best solution. Don't feel constrained here by rails tests. and Maybe also write rake task for it, even add it to crontab. I think this is some kind of integration test.