Hi Josef,
I think it's a fair comment to say that JBehave is development-centric
(not necessarily developer-centric though) as its main focus has always
been the ability to support CI. As such it does require some
knowledge in the team with respect to build and SCM technologies and the
likes. It could be qualified as a toolkit - which needs to be
customised and adapted to the project needs. Once set up it can be
used by less technical members of the team.
As for your points below, have you ever tried using archetypes:
http://jbehave.org/reference/stable/archetypes.html
They are meant precisely for the purpose of getting people started with
a simple but working project. There is a jbehave-spring-archetype
which sets up the autowiring of steps classes using Spring.
That said, we always strive to improve the documentation and make the
learning curve less steep. Sometimes though it's not so easy to judge
this steepness when one is too close to the development.
Help from someone like you who's not a full-time developer would be very
welcome. If you have time to provide a doc page as a patch that would
detail how you'd approach a "getting started" page, it'd be great.
http://jbehave.org/reference/stable/how-to-contribute.html
Thanks for your feedback.
On 06/03/2014 14:36, Josef Dietl wrote:
Hi Janusz,
Thanks for taking up this topic. I was having similar problems to get
started, and for organizational reasons, I couldn't approach the group.
I don't mean to offend anybody. Everybody here is incredibly helpful,
and the software is really great. But the learning curve is wild.
Given the deep questions I saw here while lurking, I wasn't exactly
inspired to step up, despite all the helpful attitude of Mauro and
everybody.
A bit about myself: I'm not a full-time developer, I'm a project
manager with a passion for continuous improvement of our development
practices. I'm good enough to occasionally find something in a code
review, to make a prototype or an automated test, but my focus is on
providing the optimal environment for the development team so that
/they/ can maximize their productivity. So in order to get them to
look at JBehave and [T|AT|B]DD, I had to learn Maven and set up
JBehave on my own in a branch of the project to demonstrate the
value-add.
To cut a long story short, once I was through, adding stories and
tests on top of the existing set-up was cool and convincing, but the
path there could have been smoother.
When I was working for the W3C, we had a saying: make the simple
things simple and the hard things possible. JBehave doesn't exactly
work like that, but once I had reached the "hard" things, I also found
traction in the documentation and the sample projects.
I don't have the role to suggest anything here, but I did ask myself
repeatedly whether it wouldn't be possible to be more explicit about
the first steps. Back then, I've tried my best here ->
http://digitaler-heimwerker.de/2012/10/26/howto-maven-spring-und-jbehave/
(unfortunately German). If a check with Google Translate suggests that
this is basically useful, I'd translate and tweak this and its sibling
post (below) as needed and contribute it.
Re-reading the post, I find that I struggled most on these topics:
1.What is the /simplest/ possible working configuration of JBehave?
(there's a description on the site, but no full example... what are
the main classes, what is their relationship to each other? What do I
need to import from where? Reverse-engineering the thinking steps from
the example projects just didn't work for me.)
2.Depending on JBehave configuration and Maven configuration: Where do
I have to put this file, the stories and the step implementations?
3.And then, specifically for my almost-simplest-possible set-up: how
does all this relate with Spring.
In hindsight, the biggest problem was #2: Which file goes where...
(or, more precisely, as everything is configurable: which
configuration determines what goes where, and what are the defaults?)
For a slightly more advanced topic, there's even a post in English:
http://digitaler-heimwerker.de/2013/03/04/mocking-file-access-for-testing-with-jbehave-and-easymock/
I hope this helps. JBehave is really great, and I hope this message is
advancing its progress.
Thank you all for your great work!
Best wishes,
Josef
*From:*Janusz Kowalczyk [mailto:[email protected]]
*Sent:* Donnerstag, 6. März 2014 12:58
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* [jbehave-user] Why JBehave repo examples and website are
the worst example of work ever created by the any of the open source
communitties?
It's truly remarkable that I haven't gave up yet in my attempts to use
JBehave many after days wasted on trying to figure out how to run
examples give on the jbehave.org <http://jbehave.org> or the ones
available in the project's repo.
Does any of the project members heard of Developer Experience?
Are there any chances that this will change in near future or this
project will keep to scare off more people?
Cheers
J
