Open Space Coding Day: TDD As If You Meant It and Cucumber With IronRuby

Saturday I was at the Open Space Coding Day that was part of the Alt.Net UK Conference 2009.

In the morning, I was in the session on TDD As If You Meant It. Gojko Adzic already did a pretty good write up, so I'll point you there to learn more about it: TDD as if you meant it – revisited.

In the afternoon, I was in the session about using Cucumber and RSpec with IronRuby. Mostly, I was interested in this because I keep hearing really good things about Cucumber, but as a non-ruby person, I have never quite discovered what those good things actually look like.

I was also a bit psyched, because I was pretty sure I'd heard that IronRuby was going 1.0 on my birthday. But alas, it seems that article subtly changed since I last looked at it, from saying "IronRuby is 1.0!" to now saying "IronRuby is almost at 1.0!" A slight let-down, but that's okay. We still had a good session, and I'm the first person to understand that software doesn't always magically appear on a certain date just because we want it to.

To install IronRuby, Cucumber, and RSpec, I mostly used these instructions:

• BDD with RSpec\Cucumber\IronRuby
• IronRuby and .NET

The process for me went something like this:

1. Install Ruby.
   
   
2. Install IronRuby. (The day I was doing this, 0.6 was being billed as the current release. It looks like things have moved on.)
   
   
3. From IronRuby and .NET, do:
1. Installing required gems
2. Creating a Cucumber wrapper script for IronRuby
3. Running the examples
   
   
4. Now the examples ran, but there was some weird escape-character output. I didn't find the answer to how to fix this, but another person in the session, Lorenzo Stoakes , did. Here's how that looked on Twitter.
   
   For convenience, though, I guess I'll compile that into the single sentence: In your file that corresponds to C:/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.3.92/lib/cucumber/formatter/ansicolor.rb, replace Term::AnsiColor.coloring = false if... with Term::AnsiColor.coloring = false.

At that point, the examples seemed to sort-of run okay for me. I think Lorenzo and Garry Shutler got past some warnings that were getting output, but I didn't. I'm also pretty sure Garry also got RSpec to work.

What was the whole point? Well, since I didn't get past the examples, I'll sum it up with one of them.

Say you're developing a calculator. Your business person can specify the addition behaviour in text, like this:

Feature: Addition
  In order to avoid silly mistakes
  As a math idiot 
  I want to be told the sum of two numbers

  Scenario Outline: Add two numbers
    Given I have entered  into the calculator
    And I have entered  into the calculator
    When I press add
    Then the result should be 
 on the screen

  Examples:
    | input_1 | input_2 | output |
    | 20      | 30      | 50     |
    | 2       | 5       | 7      |
    | 0       | 40      | 40     |

And you can make that executable by adding some code in a related code file like this, where you're testing a .NET assembly Calculator.dll that contains a Calculator class in the namespace Demo, and the Calculator class has push and Add methods:

require 'spec/expectations'
$:.unshift(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../lib') # This line is not needed in your own project
require 'Calculator' # Calculator.dll

Before do
  @calc = Demo::Calculator.new # A .NET class in Calculator.dll
end

Given "I have entered $n into the calculator" do |n|
  @calc.push n.to_i
end

When /I press add/ do
  @result = @calc.Add
end

Then /the result should be (.*) on the screen/ do |result|
  @result.should == result.to_i
end

That does look pretty sweet.