I ran into the same problem and never really found a good answer via the test objects. The only solution I saw was to actually update the session via a controller. I defined a new action in one of my controllers from within test_helper (so the action does not exist when actually runnning the application). I also had to create an entry in routes. Maybe there’s a better way to update routes while testing. So from my integration test I can do the following and verfiy: assert(session[:fake].nil?, “starts empty”) v = ‘Yuck’ get ‘/user_session’, :fake => v assert_equal(v, session[:fake], “value was set”)

We were not strictly blackbox testing our application. We wanted to simulate a user walking thru specific scenarios in the app which required that we have corresponding data in the database. This helps ensure integration between the frontend and backend was wired up successfully and would give us a foundation for testing critical user flows.

White-box tests at the system level (formerly known as System / Feature tests)

White-box testing (also known as clear box testing, glass box testing, transparent box testing, and structural testing) is a method of software testing that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality (i.e. black-box testing)