As an experience Ruby dev, these are pretty much all standard practices in real projects. I don't like shared examples, wince at the thought of that much complexity being hidden away in a test!
I keep shared examples to a minimum, but I do find them useful in some cases, such as when I have to test the same few attributes over and over in different contexts. But I define the shared example in the same file that uses them, and never have project-wide shared example groups.
