Speed up testing suite

[tbjoern]

Currently the testing suite runs in about 1 minute and 45 seconds on my machine. A large portion of the time is taken up by controller and view tests.

We should look at refactoring these controller/view tests to be unit tests instead of integration tests.
Generally a lot of tests are written as integration tests when unit tests would be sufficient.
Lets collect candidates in this issue and refactor them in the refactor_tests branch.