via: Joseph Wilk » Cucumber waves goodbye to GivenScenario.

Did you know you can reuse steps definitions inside step definitions? Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say you’re writing a scenario for Logout and it looks something like this:

Scenario: Logout
  Given I am logged in
  When I follow "Logout"
  Then I should see "Logout successful!"
  And I should get a success response

Let’s assumed that before this scenario, you wrote a scenario for logging in like this:

Scenario: Login with email
  Given I am not logged in
  And user "melvin@volcanicmarketing.com" with password "secret" and openid " " exists
  When I go to the login page
  And I fill in "email" with "melvin@volcanicmarketing.com"
  And I fill in "password" with "secret"
  And I press "Login"
  Then I should see "Login successful!"
  And I should get a success response

Now inside the step definitions for the “I am logged in” (from the Logout scenario), you could run through the process of logging in manually or you could reuse a lot of the step definitions you’ve already written for the “Login with email” scenario.

Here’s how you do it:

# features/step_definitions/auth_steps.rb

Given /^I am logged in$/ do
  Given 'I am not logged in'
  And 'user "melvin@volcanicmarketing.com" with password "secret" and openid " " exists'
  And 'I go to the login page'
  And 'I fill in "email" with "melvin@volcanicmarketing.com"'
  And 'I fill in "password" with "secret"'
  And 'I press "Login"'
end

As you can see, you just have to include the step inside single quotes. Pretty cool, huh?

PS: I am a cucumber beginner so don’t take anything in this post to be the right way to do things.

I’ll admit it: I’m not a big fan of testing. I border-line hate it. Why? Mostly because I don’ get it yet and I find that it really doubles or triples the time it takes for me to finish a piece of code. I’ve watched parts of the Peepcode screencasts on testing. I’ve read the testing sections of various books. And I’ve even watched a few of the videos on testing at Best Tech Videos. It still hadn’t sunk in. I mean, I understood the code of it but not the “what’s in it for me?” The usual reasons people give are that you’ll catch broken code as soon as it breaks. Ehh, whatever! I browser test & console test as I write code so I usually know when something is not working as it should. But I hadn’t given up hope! I was knew that it in concept, it’s a good idea and that I just didn’t understand the workflow yet. So I’ve been looking for something/someone to show me HOW  to do it right. And with the help of Rails Envy podcast, I’ve found what I’m looking for… I think. You can get it here: http://www.railsprescriptions.com

I’ve just read the first 31 pages and I’m excited to give Behavior Driven Development a real shot. My first commercial rails project is a webapp called BrainBank. I didn’t have to write tests for the billling & accounts parts because I had bought the Rails SaaS Kit by Ben. The parts I added work as I far as I can tell. I’m probably going to add a few tests for the most critical areas but I’ve console & browser tested it to an Nth degree so I’m not going to spend too much time writing tests  for it. I’m going to launch with the tests I’ve got because I know no one will loose money, die or threaten to kill me/people I know based on what I’ve got in there. 

Here’s what I’m going to do instead:

I’ve got a second commercial project already cooking in my head… so I’m going to solely rely on BDD to build this app… and learn from that experience.

In case it hasn’t been obvious, I recommend you check out Noel Rappin’s (is that really his last name?) ebook and buy his book when it comes out.