On 13 Jan 2009, at 20:10, James Byrne wrote:
Stephen Eley wrote:
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 10:41 AM, James Byrne <[email protected]>
wrote:
Logins are a pervasive feature of this application
Which is exactly why you should standardize. If you try to be
accommodating toward unclear communication, you're just going to
create confusion when people need to get things done.
I appreciate the advice and accept the wisdom that it contains. I
have
no intention of handling with a regexp every situation where there
might
be more than one English expression available to express a concept.
Nor
do I intend to otherwise permit multiplicities of expression to exist.
However, on the matter of log in versus log on and its common
variations, I think I will stick with my initial instinct.
Initially I
provided the different variants of login matchers along the lines
shown
below:
When /see a login success message/ do
have_selector("#login_current")
end
When /see a log in success message/ do
Then "see a login success message"
end
When /see a sign on success message/ do
...
The revised regexp version simply puts all of these together in one
place for me. As for forcing people to remember that it is login and
not logon; well this project does not exist in a vacuum. The people
involved deal with at least three different operating systems every
day,
each one of which has its own dialect with respect to what constitutes
an authenticated user. I will accept a little flexibility of
expression
here in the service of user comfort.
In any case the term login, in the context of a web application
environment, seems a bit of a misnomer from the outset. I cannot get
too worked up over the idea of unclear communication when one is
dealing
with as muddy a concept as that represented by login. Really, what I
should be saying is:
Given user "myuser" has a current authenticated session
And I see the session authenticated message
When I terminate my current session
Then the current session is destroyed
And I should see the user authentication request message
However, current authenticated session tends to be a little unwieldy
in
casual speech.
I actually rather like the unambiguous, and jargon-free 'current
authenticated session' phraseology, but I'm not one of your users, so
that doesn't really matter!
I have one more suggestion. From all these different ways of saying
the same thing, pick a winner, then write a regexp step that catches
all the possible alternative ways of expressing it you can think of,
and raises an error saying "did you mean 'current authenticated
session'" (or whatever).
That will meet both your original goal of making the features
approachable for your users who are awash with different terminology
from different systems, and the one that we're pushing you towards of
trying to keep your domain vocabulary as simple as possible.
Matt Wynne
http://blog.mattwynne.net
http://www.songkick.com
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