Given Due Consideration

Or: Just Say No to Cukes

As alluded to by veez, the undercurrent from some of us at Hashrocket has been decidedly anti-cucumber. Here’s my brief littany:

• A well developed cucumber suite is invariably slow to run
• For me, at least, it makes development feel slower (this is almost certainly perceptual, but that doesn’t mean it’s not actual as well)
• The indirection makes debugging laborious
• Matching plain english to executable code via regular expressions just feels wrong

All of these things (and more) have been excused for quite some time because Cucumber is thought of as a necessary tax. If you want to do full stack integration testing in Ruby… this is how it’s done.

Here’s the good news: it’s not the only way! Veez has gone over the basics in the post I linked above, so I won’t belabor the setup, though I will give you the latest version. Here are the relevant bits of my spec/spec_helper.rb:

  require 'webrat'
  require 'spec/support/integration'

  Webrat.configure do |config|
    config.mode = :rails
  end

  Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
    config.include(Webrat::Matchers, :type => [:integration])
  end

  class ActionController::Integration::Session; include Spec::Matchers; end

Interleaving the above into your existing spec_helper.rb is all you need to get going.

Let’s use this user story from a project I’m working on now as the backdrop to our discussion:

In order to dissolve a business relationship
As a user
I want to be able to remove a colleague

Scenario:
Given a user with colleagues
When I click a colleagues “Remove colleague” button
Then I should be on the colleagues list
And I should not see the colleague
And the colleague should not see me in their colleague list

Here’s how you might implement that using RSpec and Webrat:

  describe "User removes colleague" do
    before do
      login_as @user
      visit colleauges_path
      click_button 'Remove colleague'
    end

    it "redirects you to the colleagues list" do
      current_url.should == colleagues_url
    end

    it "removes them from my colleagues list" do
      response.body.should_not have_tag('#colleagues .colleague')
    end

    it "removes me from their colleague list" do
      logout
      login_as(@colleague)
      visit colleauges_path
      response.body.should_not have_tag('#colleagues .colleague')
    end
  end

That’s all well and good, but you may be saying to yourself (or your co-worker, or your poor, terrified cat): “But, that doesn’t capture the plain english user story! Darn it all to Bethesda!”. And you’re absolutely right… but how’s this strike you:

  Feature "User removes colleague" do
    Given do
      login_as @user
      visit colleagues_path
      click_button 'Remove colleague'
    end

    Scenario "removal" do
      When "I press remove" do
        Then "I should be on my collegues list" do
          current_url.should == colleagues_url
        end

        And "I should not see the user in my colleagues list" do
          response.body.should_not have_tag('#colleagues .colleague')
        end

        And "My colleague should not see me in their colleague list" do
          logout
          login_as @colleague
          visit colleagues_path
          response.body.should_not have_tag('#colleagues .colleague')
        end
      end
    end
  end

@l4rk and I came up with this clever bit of aliasing to get you where you want to go. Just add this at the bottom of your spec_helper.rb:

  module Spec::DSL::Main
    alias :Feature :describe
  end

  module Spec::Example::ExampleGroupMethods
    alias :Scenario :describe
    alias :When :describe
    alias :Given :before #TODO: make Given take :before or :after and :each or :all
    alias :Then :example
    alias :And :example
  end

The failing of this technique, for the time being, is the round-trip output:

User removes colleague removal I press remove

• I should be on my collegues list
• I should not see the user in my colleagues list
• My colleague should not see me in their colleague list

But we’re already scheming up a way to improve that situation, so stay tuned as the story develops.