Jay fields wrote a blog post about the maintainability of tests. Basically his takeaways were the following:

1. You should probably write unit tests

If you've ever had the setup of using cucumber, autospec, and sunspot SOLR in one your rails applications, chances are you've tried hitting your SOLR test instance just to verify that the whole stack works.

If you're using acts_as_solr and not disabling it on your tests, or want to enable or disable it selectively, try my fork of mattmatt-acts_as_solr on http://github.com/cyx/acts_as_solr.

In a nutshell, you put this in your test_helper: