07: Joe Colantonio : BDD Made Easy with Thucydides

BDD made easy with Thucydides

Are you using jBehave or EasyB to create your Behavior Driven Development tests and wish there was an easier way to write and get better reporting functionality? Thucydides is a tool designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier. Thucydides integrates seamlessly with jBheave and Selenium WebDriver. Listen to hear more about this must have BDD tool.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Thucydides (Thoo-SID-a-dees) is an open source tool designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier.
• It provides features that make it easier to organize and structure your acceptance tests, associating them with the user stories or features that they test.
• As the tests are executed, Thucydides automatically generates illustrated documentation (reports) describing how the application is used based on the stories described by the tests.
• Thucydides provides strong support for automated web tests based on Selenium 2, though it can also be used effectively for non-web tests.
• Thucydides uses jBehave.
• So it uses the same syntax that we are familiar with from our work last year except T for Thucydides also adds an extra @Step annotation. Used correctly this will allow us to create higher level BDD statements without worrying about low level detail at the G/W/T level.
• Using the @Step should make our tests more readable, reusable and maintainable!
• The @Step annotation tells Thucydides that this step should appear in the report
• It's  all about the reports! Identify stakeholder and their needs
• If we start to think how do we want our output to look like, it will help use to:

1. Create our BDDs at the right level
2. Make our test more reliable and maintainable
3. Organize our test correctly
4. Add value for multiple stakeholders

• Tags can be used to identify certain concerns
• Tags need to be introducted usng the Meta Keyword
• Tags start with @ and can be any text value

Resources

• jBehave + Selenium – Getting started with Thucydides – Part 1
• Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing – Gojko Adzic

Tools

• Thucydides
• jBehave
• Selenium

Connect with Joe

• Joe's Blog
• TestTalks Feedback – feedback@testtalks.com