"Designing programs with RSpec and Cucumber (plus a book recomendation)" by Eric

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:55:15 +0000

Cobol, I think, pretty much has to be reckoned as a total failure.

And in general, I dislike “natural language” programming tools. I still loathe AppleScript, for example, because I could never guess when the parser wanted me to include a “the” token.

On the hand, I know at least one Scheme hacker who loves Inform. And since I respect his taste in matters of natural language parsing, I suspect that Inform must be at least modestly amusing.

Cucumber succeeds, I think, because it’s not even remotely a programming language. It’s just a bunch of regex matchers wired up to Webrat. You can’t loop, you can’t declare variables, and you certainly can’t call subroutines. Really, all you can do is write heavily stylized documentation, and verify it against your program. And on this level, weirdly, it works.

I try very hard to not judge programming languages too quickly. I mean, at first glance, Haskell looks like a deliberately crippled academic toy, Ruby looks like warmed-over Python, and Lisp looks like (in Larry Wall’s immortal worlds) “a bowl of oatmeal full of finger clippings.” But I would have a lot less fun programming if I hadn’t taken the time to get past those first impressions.

"Designing programs with RSpec and Cucumber (plus a book recomendation)" by Bryan O'Sullivan

Fri, 01 May 2009 17:24:54 +0000

Oh wow. I never knew that Rubyists had a Cobol fetish. I think I liked my brain better when it didn’t contain that knowledge.

Designing programs with RSpec and Cucumber (plus a book recomendation)

Eric Kidd — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:07:00 +0000

Over the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally written Ruby programs using RSpec and (more recently) Cucumber. These two tools are inspired by Test Driven Development (TDD), a school of thought which says you should write unit tests before implementing a feature.

When doing TDD, you work inwards from the interface to the implementation. You start by writing a test case against the interface you wish you had, and then you make that test case work. This is a subtle shift in how you approach a design problem, but it frequently results in beautiful APIs. (And you also get a fully automated test suite for your software, liberating you to make much larger changes without fear of breaking things.)

The problem with the word “test”

Unfortunately, the name “Test Driven Development” is misleading. Most folks think of “testing” as something you do after development is complete. But TDD is really more of a design activity—you’re specifying how your APIs should work before you actually start coding.

Dan North spent some time struggling to teach developers about TDD. After a while, he decided that the main barrier to understanding was the word “test.” He proposed replacing TDD with Behavior Driven Development (BDD), and he started referring to unit tests as “specifications.”

In the Ruby community, the most popular BDD tool is RSpec. Using RSpec, you might specify an API something like this:

describe "simplify_name" do
  it "should convert all letters to lowercase" do
    simplify_name("AbC").should == "abc"
  end

  it "should remove everything but letters and spaces" do
    simplify_name(" Joe Smith 3 -+\n").should == "joe smith"
  end
end

After writing this specification, you would then go ahead and implement simplify_name. And from then on, whenever you changed your program, you could automatically check it against this specification.

Using specifications to communicate with clients and users

By itself, RSpec is mostly useful for programmers. Sure, a specification looks a lot like English. But would you really want to show it to an end user?

Cucumber goes one step further. Instead of using code to specify how an API should work, it uses plain text to describe how a user interface should work. For example:

Feature: Log in and out
  As an administrator
  I want to restrict access to certain portions of my site
  In order to prevent users from changing the content

  Scenario: Logging in
    Given I am not logged in as an administrator
    When I go to the administrative page
    And I fill in the fields
      | Username | admin  |
      | Password | secret |
    And I press "Log in"
    Then I should be on the administrative page
    And I should see "Log out"

  Scenario: Logging out
    ...

Here’s the neat part: This specification is actually an executable program. Each line of text corresponds to a “step”, which is defined in another file. Here’s an example from the standard webrat_steps.rb file:

Then /^I should see "([^\"]*)"$/ do |text|
  response.should contain(text)
end

Cucumber encourages you to think at a very high level, and to specify how different users will actually use your software. It’s particularly helpful if you need to communicate between programmers and end-users.

My experiences with RSpec and Cucumber

I’ve been using RSpec on and off for a couple of years now, and Cucumber since late last year. Initially, I found both tools fascinating, but also a bit frustrating. Both RSpec and Cucumber have very strong opinions about how you should write software. Now, I found those opinions very interesting, and I was quite happy to be influenced by the assumptions built into the tools. But every now and then, I would need to do something that the authors of RSpec and Cucumber hadn’t anticipated, and I would inevitably wind up struggling to make things work.

But recent versions of RSpec and Cucumber are richer and more flexible. They cover more important cases straight out of the box, and they’re easier to customize. So I can finally recommend both tools for real-world projects: They’ll still guide your thinking, but they should give you enough flexibility to handle the corner-cases.

The RSpec (and Cucumber) book

Unfortunately, the documentation for RSpec and Cucumber is scattered around the web, and there aren’t enough online guides showing the best way to solve common problems.

But the Pragmatic Press is working on The RSpec Book, which contains a large section on Cucumber, and a walkthrough of a typical development session using Cucumber and RSpec.

Currently, the RSpec book is available as a “beta book”. This is a downloadable, DRM-free PDF, with periodic updates throughout the publishing process. Right now, between one-third and one-half of the chapters have been roughed in, and the book is already very useful.

So if you’re curious about RSpec and Cucumber, have a look around the two web sites, and maybe watch some of the screencasts. If you decide to investigate further, pick up the beta book and dive in.