[LRUG] Writing readable feature tests with RSpec

[Murray Steele]

I really liked that article because it matches how I write rspec features :)

I like cucumber because of how it makes me think about what the user
journey I’m testing is actually about and for, but I dislike cucumber
because I think the regexp matching for step definitions places an
unnecessary burden on the developer.

But I find that I write very cucumber-ish rspec features.  I’ll have a bit
of “As a… I want to… In order to…” as the name of the feature and then my
scenario names will be a imperative style “given…when…then…” describing
what’s going on.  The actual body of the scenario will be a bunch of very
high-level method calls like “login_as_a_whatever_user”, “create_a_blah”,
“search_for_something”, “check_that_widget_appears_in_the_place”.

I try to keep raw capybara calls out of the scenario body and only use it
in those methods.  I’m not totally strict about that, I might allow myself
a visit “/some/path” or click_on ‘some label’ as I think they’re pretty
readable.  I also find that I’m not that interested in reuse of these
methods.  I might extract some common helpers for dealing with login or
dealing with common UI patterns, but mostly the methods live at the bottom
of the feature file they’re used in.

I think this gives me the same thoughtfulness and readability of a cucumber
feature, but without the context switch of dealing with gherkin,
step_definitions and World(all the helpers).


On 25 July 2014 10:26, Joel Chippindale <joel.chippindale at futurelearn.com>
wrote:

> We recently blogged about how, at FutureLearn, we write readable feature
> tests with RSpec*, see
> https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/how-we-write-readable-feature-tests-with-rspec/,
> and it made me wonder how common this approach was.
>
> Are any of you using this approach already? If so, how are you finding it?
>
> J.
>
>
> * Hat tip to the developers at Econsultancy who introduced me to this way
> of using RSpec.
>
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