YARD-Cucumber: A Requirements Documentation Tool

YARD-Cucumber (formerly Cucumber-In-The-Yard) is a YARD extension that processes Cucumber features, scenarios, steps, tags, step definitions, and even transforms to provide documentation similar to what you expect to how YARD displays classes, methods and constants.This tools bridges the gap of having feature files found in your source code and true documentation that your team, product owners and stakeholders can use.

I have created a trivial, example project to help provide a quick visualization of the resulting documentation. I encourage you to look at it as an example and see if it would assist your project from a multitude of perspectives: as the project's core developer; another developer or a new developer; quality assurance engineer; or product owner/stakeholder.

The implemented example has been deployed at http://burtlo.github.io/yard-cucumber/.

1. View Features and Scenarios example

2. Search through features, scenarios, and tags

3. Dynamic Tag Unions and Intersections example

4. View all features and scenarios by tag example

5. View Step Definitions and Transforms example

6. All steps matched to step definitions

7. Steps that have transforms applied to them

8. Undefined steps and even Rubular links of your step definitions.

9. Feature directories with a README.md will be parsed into the description example

10. Configurable Menus - want a searchable steps menu and remove the tags menu

11. Step definitions in your language (Ruby 1.9.2 - Internationalization)

YARD-Cucumber requires the following gems installed:

Gherkin 2.2.9 - http://cukes.info Cucumber 0.7.5 - http://cukes.info YARD 0.8.1 - http://yardoc.org

To install yard-cucumber use the following command:

$ gem install yard-cucumber

(Add sudo if you're installing under a POSIX system as root)

YARD supports for automatically including gems with the prefix yard- as a plugin. To enable automatic loading yard-cucumber.

$ mkdir ~/.yard
$ yard config load_plugins true
$ yardoc 'example/**/*.rb' 'example/**/*.feature'

Now you can run YARD as you normally would and have your features, step definitions and transforms captured.

An example with the rake task:

require 'yard'

YARD::Rake::YardocTask.new do |t|
t.files   = ['features/**/*.feature', 'features/**/*.rb']
t.options = ['--any', '--extra', '--opts'] # optional
end

• Adding or Removing search fields (yardoc)

Be default the yardoc output will generate a search field for features and tags. This can be configured through the yard configuration file ~/.yard/config to add or remove these search fields.

--- !ruby/hash-with-ivars:SymbolHash
elements:
  :load_plugins: true
  :ignored_plugins: []
  :autoload_plugins: []
  :safe_mode: false
  :"yard-cucumber":
    menus: [ 'features', 'directories', 'tags', 'steps', 'step definitions' ]
ivars:
  :@symbolize_value: false

By default the configuration, yaml format, that is generate by the yard config command will save a SymbolHash. You can still edit this file add the entry for :"yard-cucumber": and the sub-entry menus: which can contain all of the above mentioned menus or simply an empty array [] if you want no additional menus.

• Step definitions in your language (Ruby 1.9.2)

Again the yard configuration file you can define additional step definitions that can be matched.

:"yard-cucumber":
  language:
    step_definitions: [ 'Given', 'When', 'Then', 'And', 'Soit', 'Etantdonné', 'Lorsque', 'Lorsqu', 'Alors', 'Et' ]

In this example, I have included the French step definition words alongside the English step definitions. Even without specifying this feature files in other languages are found, this provides the ability for the step definitions to match correctly to step definitions.

• Exclude features or scenarios from yardoc

You can exclude any feature or scenario from the yardoc by adding a predefined tags to them. To define tags that will be excluded, again in yard configuration file:

:"yard-cucumber":
  exclude_tags: [ 'exclude-yardoc', 'also-exclude-yardoc' ]

There are two things that I enjoy: a test framework written in my own Domain Specific Language (DSL) that is easily understood by all those on a project and the ability for all participants to easily read, search, and view the tests.

Cucumber is an amazing tool that allowed me to define exercisable requirements. My biggest obstacle was bringing these requirements to my team, the product owner, and other stakeholders.

Initially I tried to expose more of the functionality by providing freshly authored requirements through email, attachments to JIRA tickets, or linked in wiki documents. None of these methods were very sustainable or successful. First, I was continually pushing out the documents to those interested. Second, the documents were displayed to the user in text without the syntax highlighting that was exceedingly helpful for quickly understanding the requirements.

I also found it hard to share the test framework that I had put together with another developer that joined the team. It was difficult to direct them around the features, tags, step definitions, and transforms. It was when I started to convey to them the conventions that I had established that I wished I had a tool that would allow me to provide documentation like one would find generated by a great tool like YARD.

So I set out to integrate Cucumber objects like features, backgrounds, scenarios, tags, steps, step definitions, and transforms into a YARD template. From my quick survey of the landscape I can see that the my needs are different than a lot of others that use Cucumber. The entire project that spawned this effort was solely to exercise the functionality of a different, large project and so there is a huge dependence on having the requirements documented. This is in contrast to other projects that are using this on a small scale to test the functionality of small software component. Though, ultimately, I realized that the functionality may provide a valuable tool for many as I feel it helps more solidly bridge the reporting of the documentation by putting a coat of paint on it.

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2011 Franklin Webber

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.