Stories

Stories and User Acceptance Tests for the minimalist test framework Contest.

Write user stories and user acceptace tests using Contest, the tiny add on to Test::Unit that provides nested contexts and declarative tests.

Declare your stories as follows:

require 'stories'

class UserStoryTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  story "As a user I want to create stories so I can test if they pass" do
    setup do
      @user = "valid user"
    end

    scenario "A valid user" do
      assert_equal "valid user", @user
    end
  end
end

If you are using Rails, you can use stories for your integration tests with Webrat:

class UserStoriesTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
  story "As a user I want to log in so that I can access restricted features" do
    setup do
      @user = User.spawn :name => "Albert", :email => "albert@example.com"
    end

    scenario "Using good information" do
      visit "/"
      click_link "Log in"
      fill_in "Email", :with => user.email
      fill_in "Password", :with => user.password
      click_button "Sign in"

      assert_contain "Logout"
      assert_contain "Welcome Albert"
    end
  end
end

This will produce the following output:

- As a user I want to log in so that I can access restricted features
    Using good information
        Go to “/”
        Click “Log in”
        Fill in “Email” with “albert@example.com”
        Fill in “Password” with “secret”
        Click “Sign in”
        I should see “Logout”
        I should see “Welcome Albert”

Stories ships with reports for many Webrat helpers, but you can write your own version or add reports for other helpers.

For instance, let's say you add this assertion:

module Test::Unit::Assertions
  def assert_current_page(path)
    assert_equal path, current_url.sub(%r{^http://www\.example\.com}, '')
  end
end

When you run it, no output will be generated because Stories doesn't know what to say about this assertion. Adding a custom report is easy:

module Stories::Webrat
  report_for :assert_current_page do |page|
    "I should be on #{quote(page)}"
  end
end

All this should reside in your stories_helper.rb.

There are two other methods that are useful for reporting steps or assertions: silent and report.

The silent helper gives you the ability to suspend the steps and assertions' normal output:

...
silent do
  assert_contain "Some obscure hash"
end
...

In a similar fashion, report lets you replace the normal output with your own message:

...
report "I verify that the hash generated correctly" do
  assert_contain "The same obscure hash"
end
...

You can run it normally, it's Test::Unit after all. If you want to run a particular test, say "yet more tests", try this:

$ ruby my_test.rb -n test_yet_more_tests

Or with a regular expression:

$ ruby my_test.rb -n /yet_more_tests/

Since Stories aims to improve your project's documentation, you can have pending stories:

class UserStoryTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  story "As a user I want to create stories so I can test if they pass"
end

This is useful if you want to write all your stories upfront, even before you write the acceptance tests.

You can get a nice output with your user stories with the stories runner:

$ ruby my_test.rb --runner=stories

Now, if you want to impress everyone around you, try this:

$ ruby my_test.rb --runner=stories-pdf

You will get a nicely formatted PDF with your user stories. It uses Prawn, so you will need to install it first.

If you're using Rails, you can run the whole build with the following Rake tasks:

$ rake stories
$ rake stories:pdf

$ sudo gem install stories

If you want to use it with Rails, add this to config/environment.rb:

config.gem "stories"

Then you can vendor the gem:

rake gems:install
rake gems:unpack

Copyright (c) 2009 Damian Janowski and Michel Martens for Citrusbyte

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.