Outside-in development taken too far

You may feel someone is taking things too far when you receive a set of scenarios like this:

Scenario 1: Warm Teapot

Given a Kettle of Boiling Water
When Boiling Water is poured in to the Teapot
Then it should* warm the Teapot

Scenario 2: Brewing the tea

Given a Kettle of Boiling Water
And 5 Teabags
When 5 Teabags are placed in the Teapot
And Boiling Water is poured in to the Teapot
And the Teapot is left with the above ingredients in it for 5 minutes
Then you should have Brewed Tea

Scenario 3: Pouring the tea

Given a Teapot of Brewed Tea
And a Mug with some Milk in it**
When the Brewed Tea is poured in to the Mug
Then you should have a Perfect Cup of Tea

* “Do or do not. There is no should”
** Debatable. I think we need to triangulate this, or consult the client.

Passing cucumber specs on windows

I had some trouble getting cucumber test features to pass on Windows due to directory separator differences, something like:

 Failing Scenarios:
-cucumber features/background/failing_background.feature:8 # Scenario: failing background
+cucumber features\background\failing_background.feature:8 # Scenario: failing background

There is an easy solution — run features with windows_mri profile, which results in the CUCUMBER_FORWARD_SLASH_PATHS environment variable being set to true.

Example

cucumber features/background.feature:93 -p windows_mri

Rake — shell task failure

For my current project, we’re running cucumber as one of our tasks. Our report generation runs afterwards — which we need to happen regardless of cucumber’s exit code (cucumber exits with code 1 when any tests fail).

Handling shell task failure

We noticed that if cucumber fails, rake exits immediately — without running our subsequent report tasks.

We’re running cucumber with rake’s ruby function — which runs the ruby interpreter in its own process by invoking a shell command.

Pseudo-stacktrace (irrelevant source lines omitted):

Shell::CommandProcessor.system(command, *opts)
Rake::Win32.rake_system(*cmd)
FileUtils.sh(*args, &block)
FileUtils.ruby(*args, &block)

The key to this is the behaviour of rake’s FileUtils.sh. Examining the source shows:

If it is not supplied a block, and the shell command fails, and rake exits with error status.

Aside: For some reason, Kernel.system echoes errors.

Example

This task will cause rake to exit immediately with status 1:

task 'this-one-fails' do
    ruby("xxx")
end

while the following task does not cause rake to terminate  normally, any subsequent task will still run:

path = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + ‘/output/cucumber-manual.txt’)

cuke_path = ‘C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/cucumber-0.3.3/bin/cucumber’

ruby(“#{cuke_path} -h > ‘#{path}’”) do |success, exit_code|

puts “Exited with code: #{exit_code}” if !success

end

task 'this-one-succeeds' do
    ruby("xxx") do |success, exit_code|
        puts "Exited with code: #{exit_code.exitstatus}" unless success
    end
end

Getting the last exit status

The $? variable contains the status of the last child process to terminate. This may be useful if steps subsequent to the failed one require this information.