The describe() method is used to describe a class, method or an example group. This is the outer block which actually contains the test code and it depicts the characteristics of the code enclosed in it. This method takes a number of arguments and an optional block. However, normally one or two arguments are used to describe the behavior of the example group. The first argument represents the reference to the class or module whereas the second argument is optional whose datatype would be String. The example groups can be nested as well. An example of using the describe method is as follows:<syntaxhighlight lang="ruby">