Just a thought, I know we can contribute to the existing docs in git but finding them is not as transparent at first glance... Maybe a new project called jbehave-docs would be more useful than a wiki which can extend the existing markdowns for new and or non-technical users of jBehave-docs... It would be good to have a discussion about what's missing from existing docs and how can the community help improve these docs for all users so that a well defined structure can be put together...
Just some of my thoughts and I would be happy to help... Cheers, Paul -------- Original message -------- From: Hans Schwäbli <[email protected]> Date:03/14/2014 11:54 AM (GMT-05:00) To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [jbehave-user] JBehave learning curve Hello Josef, I think the technical part of JBehave is really intended for software developers, so it requires that knowledge. JBehave is a tool with a lot of features and has its complexity. It is well designed, of good quality and free. So there are of course some drawbacks like little documentation. Anyone can participate in creating such documentation, and some people do. I personally would hope, that an official Wiki is established for JBehave. That could help to solve that. It cold be helpful if the documentation is clearly separated into a part for story writers with no programming skills and for step implementers (developers). I could establish that official Wiki if the JBehave owners agree, so that people can easily participate in creating missing documentation and updating it in a central place of knowledge. 2014-03-06 14:36 GMT+01:00 Josef Dietl <[email protected]>: 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 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
