I’m reading the excellent Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. And in it I stumbled on a interesting story, and when I started to think about how it could be applied in the Software development world I really got excited. But all in due time. Here is the story, in my shortened and simplified form (be sure to buy the book):

BP

The example is taken from a chapter (4) called Point to the destination that talks about good ways to show people where the goal is. Surrounding this example they are talking about sending a postcard from the future; Hey, look how warm and wonderful everything is here in the future when we have changed all that stuff

Then the authors gives an example from BP (Yeah, I know that might sit bad with most people nowadays but forget the well in the...

In my last post I asked for comments, and it didn’t take Anders very long time to come up with a better and more correct solution to the problem.

The downside of my solution is that you need to tweak the build process on a build server for example. We knew that BUT I left it for later solving. There is a rename to be done and a moving of the real app.config etc.

OK - the solution has to do with the file-attribute on the AppSettings-node in .config-files. With that attribute you can point to another file that contains one or more keys from the appSettings-node. Two important things about that:

1. If the file is not present it will use the settings in the original app.config
2. If the file is present the settings in it will override any attributes that are specified in both places

[UPDATED]: See this post for a different way to do this.

In our current team, we’re doing a lot of integration testing, which means we need a well-known state in the database before each test run. We have solved this with a simple restore of a known backup before each test run (using the handy BeforeTestRun attribute of SpecFlow). But we have run into some issues…

This approach means we end up destroying the database for each other all the time during development. So we created a small database for each developer and restored that before each test run. But again, it came back to bite us.

The database name and backup name we’re restoring is stored in app.config, which means you need to change that on your local machine. A simple slip on check-in might have you distribute your app.config to the whole team, putting us...

Marcus Hammarberg embarks on an exploration of outside-in development with SpecFlow and ASP.NET MVC. In this narrative, he shares his journey from initial project setup to the implementation of specifications-driven code.

Setting the Stage

Excited about the opportunity to apply outside-in development practices to a real project, Marcus enters the office, ready to tackle the challenge. His project manager, Tobias, assigns him a task to extract tasks from the database to kickstart their learning journey.

Crafting Specifications

Together with Tobias, Marcus refines the project’s specifications, ensuring clarity and alignment with their goals. They define scenarios using Gherkin syntax to articulate the expected behavior of the application.

Implementation Begins

Marcus sets up his development environment in Visual Studio, configuring SpecFlow for executable specifications. He encounters initial challenges but perseveres, leveraging tools like Watin for browser automation to drive the development process forward.

Building the Web Application

With...

After working intensively with SpecFlow for a while now I have experienced something that I think is common. After a while you have all the steps you need… Or rather, if you write your step regular expressions carefully you’ll end up with a little language that automates the running of your application. So if you stay within the supported language you can simply write Gherkin. In Swedish for example.

It’s really cool to write Swedish that tells what the application should do. And it does it. I wrote about that experience before. The extension of this is that non-developers soon can start to write the specs and run them without any steps needed to be developed. But to do that you’ll need to have communicate which steps are supported.

Also after a while the supported regular expressions steps can be...

I have been using White in our project for a couple of days now and it’s looking good I must say. I use White in conjunction with SpecFlow to get our specifications in an executable format (that still makes me smile everything I think of it…)

What I soon realized was that much of the White-automating could be pushed to a base class… That is much of the stuff that we’re using and the way we’ll like to do stuff can be pushed downwards.

However – I think that the result is pretty generic and can be used outside our project. So if you need it you can have it.

Well known names

The first thing that we’ve thought about was the fact that most user doesn’t refer to the items in the GUI by the programming name (“So I clicked the btnSearch2-button”, doesn’t sound...

I’ve already posted this snippet in C#, but as I from time to time need it in VB.NET I’ll post that too. Here you go:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <CodeSnippets xmlns="<http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">     <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">         <Header>             <Title>TestMethod</Title>             <Shortcut>tm</Shortcut>             <Description>Code snippet for creating a test method</Description>             <Author>Marcusoft (www.marcusoft.net)</Author>             <SnippetTypes>                 <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>                 <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType>             </SnippetTypes>         </Header>         <Snippet>             <Declarations>                 <Literal>                     <ID>methodName</ID>                     <ToolTip>The name of the test</ToolTip>                     <Default>methodName</Default>                 </Literal>             </Declarations>             <Code Language="VB">               <![CDATA[<TestMethod()> _               Public Sub should\_$methodName$()         ' Arrange         ' Act         ' Assert         Assert.Fail("Implement test!")    ...