stepspecr

= StepSpecr

by Matthias Hennemeyer mhennemeyer@gmail.com

== Introduction

StepSpecr is a Rails plugin intended to be used with Rspec User Stories. It provides a 'testing' framework for speccing Given/When/Then steps within Rspec examples. This lets you implement GWT-steps the BDD way.

== Examples

=== A rather trivial one

In a plaintext story the following step is needed:
Given 1 articles Instead of 'just implement' and 'running the story as a test': write a spec:

in PROJECT_HOME/spec/steps/article_steps_spec.rb

require File.expand_path(File.dirname(FILE) + "/stepspecr_helper.rb")

describe "Given $count articles" do it "should create 1 articles for count=1" do class Article end Article.should_receive :create step_eval "Given 1 article", :articles end end

Running the example will perform the following actions:

1. It will (try to) collect the steps supplied to step_group :articles
2. It will run the step
3. It will FAIL ...

$ script/spec --format specdoc spec/steps/article_steps_spec.rb

Implement the step:

in PROJECT_HOME/stories/steps/article_steps.rb

steps_for :articles do Given "$count articles" do |count| count.to_i.times { Article.create } end end

Run the example again and it should PASS.

=== A more complex example

You want a step that creates modelobjects that are specified in the story: Given 5 articles Given 1 post Given 17 lists ...

Using StepSpecr.step is a little bit more involved than plain step_eval but gives you a facility to configure the thing so that you can DRY it up. This will be more than one example: (Just showing the description - BDD doesn't mean to write more than one example at a time)

describe "Given $count $models" do before(:all) do StepSpecr.configure do step_group :resources end end

 it "should create the specified model" do
   StepSpecr.spec "Given 1 specific_model" do
     before do 
       class SpecificModel
       end
       SpecificModel.should_receive(:create)
     end
   end
 end
 
 it "should create the specified number of models" do
    StepSpecr.spec "Given 5 specific_models" do
      before do
        class SpecificModel
        end
        SpecificModel.should_receive(:create).exactly(5).times
      end
    end
  end
 
 it "should create 17 lists for count=17, models=lists" do
   StepSpecr.spec "Given 17 lists" do
     before do
       class List
       end
       List.should_receive(:create).exactly(17).times
     end
   end
 end

end

The implementation could look like this:

steps_for :resources do Given "$count $models" do |count, name| klass = eval "#{name.singularize.camelize}" count.to_i.times { klass.create } end end

== REQUIREMENTS:

• Rspec >= 1.1.3
• rspec_on_rails

== INSTALL:

$ ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/mhennemeyer/stepspecr.git $ script/generate stepspecr

Copyright (c) 2008 Matthias Hennemeyer, released under the MIT license