On Nov 07, 2008, at 5:24 pm, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
Right, that’s why I suggested I could Kernel#eval the binary’s
contents
in the current process instead. This would require tricking Trollop,
but
I assume I could trick it by hand-crafting ARGV.
You might find Rick Bradley's talk[1] on regression testing flog
useful here. He starts by speccing the binary at a Ruby level. Note,
however, that later in the talk he admits he made a mistake in not
writing end-to-end tests soon enough. I think he should have run the
binary as a black box and just pushed binary code into lib sooner.
Ah, Cucumber. :) I’ve yet to write my first story; I somehow assumed
these are more oriented toward non-programmers and/or for driving
implementation on a rather higher level, and have to be ‘implemented’
on the RSpec level somehow anyway. I take that these assumptions are
flawed. :)
Yes and no. I wouldn't say they are oriented towards the end user -
Cucumber files are code and must be formatted strictly. But they are
readable enough that they can be understood by the end user. You
don't actually need to use RSpec in Cucumber steps - just raising an
exception when you see something you don't like is enough - but the
matchers make the steps readable.
I recommending stopping the line until you have your current
functionality described in Cucumber feature definitions, it will save
you a lot of pain in the long run.
Hm, I guess I simply need to read up on Cucumber and stories;
I still can’t see how this kind of specification would differ
(in the end) from Kernel#`-based RSpec – i.e., why implementing
the code behind these stories would side-step the underlying issue.
(But the last time I read on stories was pre-Cucumber.)
Cucumber with Kernel#` and RSpec with Kernel#` would achieve the same
thing, the difference being the structure of the files. Cucumber is
optimised to deal with higher-lever concepts, where natural language
is a more important part of the spec. RSpec is more suited to lower-
level specs where the aim is to cover every edge case or object
interaction. This would be too cumbersome with Cucumber.
Is there an example of story/Cucumber-based specification
of a binary’s behaviour available somewhere out there?
There is now :)
Well, it's a really crappy, trivial example I just made it about 10
mins. No use of STDERR, no file input/output, no network
connections. Flagrant abuse of FIT tables. Oh, and wanton sharing of
data between steps. But apart from that it's model code.
Don't take any of this as best practice! It's just to show the
concept (seeing how "sort" is presumably written in C):
# sort.feature
Feature: sort
So that I can search faster
As a person that likes searching
I want to sort data
Scenario: data ordered already
Given the following data:
| STDIN |
| apple |
| banana |
| cherry |
| mango |
| pear |
When I sort the data
Then the output should be:
| STDOUT |
| apple |
| banana |
| cherry |
| mango |
| pear |
Scenario: data out of order
Given the following data:
| STDIN |
| pear |
| mango |
| apple |
| cherry |
| banana |
When I sort the data
Then the output should be:
| STDOUT |
| apple |
| banana |
| cherry |
| mango |
| pear |
# steps/sort.rb
require 'spec'
Given %r/^the following data:$/ do |table|
@stdin = table.hashes.map { |r| r["STDIN"] }.join("\n")
end
When %r/^I sort the data$/ do
@result = `sort <<[EMAIL PROTECTED]("\n")
end
Then %r/^the output should be:$/ do |table|
@expected = table.hashes.map { |r| r["STDOUT"] }
@result.should == @expected
end
Hope this helps.
Ashley
[1] http://rubyhoedown2008.confreaks.com/11-rick-bradley-flog-test-new.html
--
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http://aviewfromafar.net/
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