On 10/15/07, Tom Stuart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 15 Oct 2007, at 10:25, Wincent Colaiuta wrote: > > - The customer/client (not necessarily with any programming > > knowledge) writes the stories in a format which is (almost) plain > > text. > > - The developer then writes custom "step matchers"; where do they go? > > - How much of parsing can be generalized and done by RSpec itself > > without requiring the developer to spend too much time writing the > > matchers? > > I'm a bit sceptical about all this (not to suggest that Wincent > necessarily is!). I don't fully grasp the implications of the > proposal either but superficially it smells like using a sledgehammer > to crack the rather straightforward nut of having something that > works like string interpolation. > > What's the problem with the alternating 'string', parameter, > 'string', parameter, 'string' syntax? It might be less aesthetically > beautiful than punctuation-free plain text but conceptually it > expresses exactly what you're trying to achieve without all of that > tedious mucking about with matching. I'm biased, I suppose; as a Ruby > programmer a big part of the conceptual beauty of examples comes from > them being written in native code, so I'd be sad to see that go out > of the window with scenarios, but I appreciate the pull of the > customer-facing aspect. Regardless I believe (without evidence) that > trying to pretend we're doing something fundamentally different to > writing a program when constructing a scenario is a recipe for > confusion at best, and the "but customers will balk at apostrophes > and commas!" sentiment feels slightly too specious to justify it.
I can tell you from my experience with FitNesse that this is sentiment does play out. Customers really get the idea that the ability to write their own acceptance tests is very powerful, but their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about programmatic things like setup and teardown (which are front and center in a FitNese page). We wanted the customer to feel ownership of the FitNesse pages - to feel free to add a new page with a new scenario to check their assumptions or to explore their questions about whether the fact that the system can do A means that it can also do B. This simply never happened. They ran the suites periodically, but they never used it as a tool to explore the system. Having this expression of stories and scenarios appearing devoid of programmatic ideas has great potential to help the customers feel ownership over stories/scenarios. Of course, there is an underlying relationship to syntax that they'd have to understand and, ideally, the system would help them out with (i.e. if they do write a new scenario with steps that don't match any existing steps, they'd be alerted). But that's all a bit down the road. Thoughts? David > > Cheers, > -Tom > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-users@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users > _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
