I have started to help out in a new OSS project. The last one was SpecFlow and now it’s Pickles. Pickles is a tool that takes .feature-files from SpecFlow or Cucumber and turns it into a nice living documentation. It’s a great addition to SpecFlow. Ok – one of the things I have been doing in the Pickles project is to create NuGet packages for the project different runners and especially lately the PowerShell runner. This will be the main way to interact with Pickles locally, which basically means that you’ll just write a command in the Package Manager Console to generate the documentation frictionless. Later you will probably run it as part of your Nant or MsBuild build files. I learned a great deal about PowerShell and NuGet when I put that NuGet package together and since it was quite some time since I blogged I thought I’ll write...

I’ve just returned back home from a course. It’s the first course I’ve attended in over a year and I’m always amazed how much you can learn in a short time; if the course and teacher is good and if you engage yourself in the course. This time I knew it would be great since Gojko Adzic was the teacher and the subject was something that I find really interesting and useful - Specification by example. I would be completely impossible to write down even a fraction of all the stuff I picked up during the two days but I thought I stop at the main points and write down what stood out for me. As I’ve been following the BDD and Specification by example community intensively for two years I had quite a lot of knowledge on before hand - the main points I wanted to get out of this...

I got a question from Sham (Shamresh Khan) that I thought was interesting and also common. So I thought I post my answer here in the public and maybe we all can learn a bit. Sham’s question was something like this: …some of my scenarios/examples, may be very technical (i.e. checking some algorithm for example). If I write these tests under a user story (using the Gherkin syntax), a business analyst will be able to see them which may confuse them as they try to work out what scenarios exist under the user story or am I wrong here? Maybe all tests should be visible under a user story? TDD and BDD This is really one of the things we struggle with when coming from using TDD for a while and then starting doing BDD. In my opinion BDD is more than anything a communication tool that helps all parts...

Last day was great. I didn’t go to anything that was really bad and I had some real highlights with Dan North, Gojko Adzic and Mark Rendle on Zen standing out as the best. After a short and intense Lean Coffee I’m not sitting and waiting for the keynote with Jeff Atwood, who apparently just introduced himself and then went off the stage yesterday. Let’s see if he does the keynote himself today Jeff Atwood on StackOverflow Jeff did the talk himself (and talked fast, fast, fast!). He talked about how programmers need rules and likes to follow (or even create) rules. Take Facebook for example - who has a “list of their friends” at home. No-one! But a geek could understand social networks by creating rules around them. A list of friend for example. Huh - I didn’t know that Jeff Atwood did invent the game-ification part of StackOverflow by accident. By...

As always - after the first day my head was just spinning. I was so tired that I slept before I hit the pillow. But today I’m feeling great again and am ready for another great day of learning. Dan North on Embracing uncertainty Dan North is one of my true heroes in our industry. I’ve learned a lot of the stuff that I’m excited about from stuff he written and spoke about. This is about embracing uncertainty - which seems to sit nice with the whole BDD - Deliberate Discovery body of knowledge. Here’s a few things I jotted down: Patterns of effective delivery (behavior patterns that is) How we turned the agile manifesto upside down nowadays The half-time of requirements - how long time before half the requirements needs to be rewritten “We would rather be wrong than be uncertain!” Christianity (!) and how faith become religion. Or values becoming rules and structure. And the...

I was very fortunate to go to OreDev this year. It’s just a great show - I described it as a “free bar of knowledge alcohol for learn-o-holics”. I thought I’ll take a few moments just to jot down some highlights and stuff I picked up during my first day at OreDev 2011. This is mostly for me… but you can read it if you want. Jon Skeet on Async in .NET 4.0 I was late to the conference and missed the keynote, that I learned was awesome, and also late to this talk. Jon Skeet on the asynchronous features of .NET 4.0. I picked up some stuff though - most noteable I’ll check out the EduAsync blog posts and code that shows of all interesting features. Aslam Kahn on Functional programming From this great session I picked up how Alsam had learned functional programming and how that changed how he...

SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic came about from my own need when I wrote something that used Simple.Data. I saw the power and simplicity (duh!) in Simple.Data by using dynamics. And I started to thinking on how it could be used in SpecFlow to further simplify and shorten up the code in my steps. This is the third and final post on SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic. Again this is not the formal documentation. It can be found here. These are just my personal preferences and thoughts on how to use it. This time with Simple.Data. And it won’t be long. SpecFlow and Simple.Data First you should check out Darren Cauthons post on using SpecFlow and simple data together. It shows the great use of a lightweight, simple data access framework in SpecFlow. As I said in my earlier post test data management is something that you often have to handle in your scenarios. Simple.Data is more than...

This is the second post about SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic – a little tool I wrote to help you write less code in your step definitions, and focus on the actual step instead of infrastructure. You can read the first post here – it explains little about what SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic is. In this post I’ll show you how some ways I use the dynamic features to and some tricks that you might not know about. Again – this is not the documentation for SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic – that can be found here. Installation With the power of NuGet it’s super-easy to install SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic by simply go: Install-Package SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic (Sidenote: Ha! It’s good to try out your own stuff. Found a bug in the 0.2 version on NuGet. Fixed it with the 0.2.1 version ) That will also pull down the latest version of SpecFlow and other dependencies needed. Test data management I found out that the...

NuGet package! I am so proud. Actually it’s just a small extension to SpecFlow and the excellent Assist helpers by Darren Cauthon. But I learned quite a lot about dynamics in the process and I thought I write a post or two on SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic; what it is, the problem it solves and how it’s made. Later post will be around how to use it and to put it together with Simple.Data to create a real sweet testing experience. Let me say – before I start – that there is documentation for usage on the GitHub wiki. This is a blog posts on how I made SpecFlow.Assist.Dynamic – not the official documentation. The problem It’s not a very big problem I’ve solved – but I grew tired of writing small classes that just was for transporting data. For example for the Gherkin-step: ``` 1: Given the following users exists in the...

I have fallen for Simple.Data. Big time. It’s so terse and concise that you almost lose the need for data access abstractions altogether. It’s just … there for you. Just see for yourself here. And when have this power at your fingertips it’s easy to forget the testing story. How should I use Simple.Data so that I still can write unit and acceptance tests with code using it? In my unit-tests I do not want to call the database, of course, because that would slow my unit-level tests down. Also if I do automated acceptance I want to go end-to-end, testing the full stack of the application. But there the database access will slow me down, often in the form of a network hop as well. Have no fear! Mr Rendle have set us up with a couple of ways to mock out the actual call to the database on...