Story Driven Development

If you are interested in testing and the TDD/BDD movements, then you may find Bryan Helmkamp presentation on "Story Driven Development" worth watching. Bryan explains the differences between unit testing and scenarios. He also shows Webrat, a tool he works on, which makes defining stories in Rails apps very easy.

I like the title that Bryan has chosen for the talk. The name "Story Driven Development" makes it clear that it's a lot about defining requirements, and not only about testing. Additionally, I think it's clear that it focuses on the acceptance level of tests without mentioning unit tests.

He also provides a quote from Robert Martin:

Unit tests: “Make sure you write the code right.”
Scenarios: “Make sure you write the right code.”

You can watch the slides here, or grab the PDF version (which has correct code examples).

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"TDD with Rails" - the slides from my talk at RuPy 2008

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BDD examples with user stories and Webrat

This is the best BDD explanation I have ever seen. It explains all the philosophy behind BDD, shows how it fits with RSpec stories, and how you can use Webrat to create a high-level integration test. It even shows how to use Selenium with RSpec stories!

Integration Testing in Ruby with RSpec's Story Automation Framework by David Chelimsky

Big thanks to David Chelimsky!

Andrzej's Rails tips #5

Two things today, both related to RSpec stories: webrat, and using regexps in RSpec stories.

Webrat with RSpec stories

What is Webrat? "Webrat lets you quickly write robust and thorough acceptance tests for a Ruby web application". It uses Hpricot under the hood and is very easy to understand just by looking at the code.

It took me only 30 minutes to turn most of my tests in one of my applications from a classic IntegrationTest-based RSpec story to Webrat. Here is one example:

When "he creates an order" do
  visits '/'
  clicks_link "New order"
  fills_in "Nr", :with => 'abc/2008'
  fills_in "Company", :with => 'ABC company'
  selects 'New'
  clicks_button 'Create'
end

Thanks to Ben, for his great article describing RSpec stories with Webrat.


RSpec, response.should have_text

Sometimes, all you need is just a check whether there is a certain message visible on a page. One way of doing that is with regexps. Here is an example step that checks for the message:

  Then "he sees a $message" do |message|
    response.should have_text(Regexp.new(message))
  end