On 7/11/07, Ashley Moran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On 11 Jul 2007, at 15:00, Pedro Del Gallego wrote:
>
> >  Thats my biggest problem with rspec, (I'm a non english speaker
> > working in a German/English environment)  It would be great a guide or
> > a tips list to make our specs more  readebles, Something like 10
> > English tips to improve your specs readability ;)
>
>
> Don't think I can come up with 10 off the top of my head but I always
> told Pawel to follow the rule "phrase descriptions as GIVEN WHEN
> THEN".  There's plenty of better examples on this list and elsewhere,
> but basically if I have an idea like this:
>
>    A cow prodded with a stick should moo
>
> I think:
>    GIVEN="a cow", WHEN="prodded with a stick", THEN="moo"
>
> and turn it into this code:
>    describe Cow do
>      before(:each) do
>        @cow = Cow.new
>      end
>      it 'should say "moo" when sent prod_with_stick' do
>        @cow.prod_with_stick.should == "moo"
>      end
>    end
>
> It doesn't apply rigidly to every situation, but 90% of the time, if
> I keep chanting GIVEN WHEN THEN I write clean, focussed specs.  The
> rest is mainly vocabulary (although sometimes it can be hard to
> phrase something clearly).

I've been in that habit too. In general, I want the GIVEN expressed in
the String passed to describe and/or before(:each). The WHEN and THEN
should be in the example. As Ashley suggests, this isn't 100% of the
time, but I find that the more I stick to this the easier it is to
grok everything when looking back.

Also, I try to stick to one WHEN and one THEN per example. This means
that if there are mocks involved, my examples generally look like
this:

it "should foo when bar" do
  collaborator.should_receive(:baz)
  thing.bar
end

OR

it "should foo when bar" do
  thing.bar
  thing.baz.should == something
end

BUT NEVER

it "should foo when bar" do
  collaborator.should_receive(:baz)
  thing.bar
  thing.fu.should == something
end

FWIW.

Cheers,
David



>
> Ashley
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