[LRUG] Writing readable feature tests with RSpec

[Andrew Premdas]

On 1 August 2014 18:40, Sam Livingston-Gray <geeksam at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 3:00 PM, Andrew Premdas <apremdas at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 31 July 2014 22:31, Sam Livingston-Gray <geeksam at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  In contrast, Ruby step definitions strongly resist refactoring, and
>>> pushing the problem out to a bunch of modules that all get included into
>>> World is only slightly better.
>>>
>>
>> No, World is one of the most misunderstood things about cucumber. I
>> believe it was a concious design decision to make World a single global
>> space. The idea of a single space is based on the understanding that viable
>> applications have clearly stated non-ambigous concepts. One of the main
>> points of writing features is to say what these concepts are and why they
>> are important. Putting your Ruby API in the single World namespace imposes
>> the discipline that in this single namespace you must be able to clearly
>> differentiate each key concept by its name. It also requires that you limit
>> the number of concepts and therefore the size of your API to something that
>> is manageable. Both of these are highly desirable. Of course this API which
>> the step definitions utilize can delegate further, but I'd question whether
>> its wise to let this further delegation leak into the actual step
>> definitions.
>>
>
> Very interesting, and thank you for a response I actually had to sit and
> think about for a day.  :D
>
> While I enthusiastically support the idea of a design decision that
> deliberately inflicts pain on those who stray from it (it's one of the
> things I love about MiniTest in theory, even if in practice I mostly use
> RSpec), I'd argue that having a global namespace for step definitions
> already accomplishes this.  Making World a single global space as well just
> means that I have to maintain two translation layers instead of one, and
> I'm not convinced that that that second layer of global-ness adds enough
> value to justify its existence.
>

World is the global namespace for step definitions, put a debug statement
in a step definition and look at self, you will get something like

#<Cucumber::Rails::World ...

World is the place to create an api for step definition implementations to
use. The next namespace up is main. I assume you're not thinking of this as
the global namespace for step definitions. Perhaps you can think of things
as two sorts of translations, but I see it as a translation followed by a
call. So we have

Feature -> translate to -> step_definion -> implement by call to -> World
api

Example:

Given I am signed in

tranlate to

Given "I am signed in" do
  # implement by a call to World api
  sign_in as: @i
end

# Define World api
module SignInSH
  def sign_in(attrs={})
    ...
  end
end
World SignInSH

Hopefully that shows that there isn't a second layer of global-ness, or a
second translation layer

All best

Andrew


>
> Related:  I finally got around to open-sourcing a gem (still in 0.x
> territory) I've been extracting from an internal project.  The README still
> lacks a good code example, but anyone brave enough to dive into the
> implementation might find it interesting:
> https://github.com/livingsocial/hypercuke
>



-- 
------------------------
Andrew Premdas
blog.andrew.premdas.org
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