On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 8:42 AM, aslak hellesoy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Dan North <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi Jim. > > > > I guess I'm not a purist then - that looks fine to me, and it's probably > > something I would consider doing too. > > The debate seems to be whether step definitions should be stateful or not. > In practice this is achieved by setting one or more @variables in a > step and reusing them in a different step - all within a scenario. > > Both are fine, but beware that as your codebase grows and you have > hundred or so step definitions, things can become *really* hard to > maintain. > It won't bite you when you start on a new codebase, but in my > experience stateful steps will bite you later. > > Having experienced this pain in one project, I decided to try out > stateless steps exclusively on the next project. I've found stateless > steps to be a tad more verbose than stateful ones, both in the text > and in the implementation (because you have to pass "identifiers" > around). Still, the improved maintainability of my features and > scenarios using this approach outweighs this slight increase in > verbosity. > > Here is an example of a stateless scenario: (As a convention I'm > "quoting" variables) > > > http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/ba/tree/master/features/submit_proposal.feature > > You can see the extra verbosity I'm talking about in the repetition of > "Aslak", "Beerfest" etc. > > I'm still pragmatic about this of course, but now you know some of my > experience. > I've done something similar, but I might have handled the steps implementation a bit differently in that I'm not sure my approach would be called stateless. For example say I had (in a very abstract form) Given 'Rick' has admin privileges Then 'Rick' can do admin function X In the step for the given, I'd get or create an admin user named rick, and set an instance variable say @admin Then in the step for the then, I'd have an expectation that the name of @admin matched the name given in the step. This was a way of catching cases where the story mixed up actors. Although the short example doesn't really emphasize the problem I was trying to solve, I'm not sure in retrospect whether or not this was a valuable thing to do. -- Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
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