Hi Paul,
thanks for sharing your thoughts. Overall, I would tend to agree with
what you're saying.
By experience, GivenStories tend to be more used and more readable as
preconditions.
Composite steps are more about providing a "zoom out" effect once the
composite steps have been defined, as you rightfully point out not just
as a Given.
Feel free to provide a patch with a doc page with these best practices.
Cheers
On 23/10/2013 12:05, Paul Barton wrote:
Hello All,
I am just curious on how the jBehave community decides when and where
to use GivenStories and Composite Steps, in order to set a best
practice for my team...
At least there seems to be some confusion in my team about where and
when to use either GivenStories or a composite steps (@Composite
annotation) (ie. some think its good to only use only GivenStories and
others only want to group every test case into a composite step)
My personal belief is that Composite Steps are there solely to provide
a declarative semantics, over that of imperative semantics of a block
of steps...
And that GivenStories are there to allow a Software Engineer in Test
to reuse isolated story files as preconditions in their stories...
And that both should be used given some best practices...
Hence a best practice I was thinking would be the following:
- CompositeSteps should only be used when attempting to provide a
declarative step for the dsl layer, only after all imperative steps
have been written for the corresponding page object
- Do not create composite steps for items that will not benefit the
readability of the step (too many parameters can hurt the readability
of a step, use GivenStories here)
- Do not create composite steps for every one off test case, only
create when you have a high impact for re-usability
- Do not restrict the use of CompositeSteps to a precondition
(@Given), as it can be used to group actions (@When) or
post-conditions (@Then) as well
- Stories called by GivenStories should be isolated (otherwise you may
end up having to manage the dependencies, ie story C uses story B uses
story A uses etc...)
- GivenStories should be used when there is a complex set of
preconditions for a story
Are my thoughts wrong or do you have some best practices to add or
share regarding when to use these features?
Cheers,
:Paul
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