Even with an army of QA Engineers, some bugs will sneak through. QA time on untested code takes longer, and debugging the code even longer than that. The release process can go from a day to several days, or even weeks.

With BDD, when new features are added to the application, it as easy as running your spec or test suite to ensure that the original functionality is undamaged. It of course seems like a no brainer to me now. It’s like looking back and remembering when you thought the world was flat, and seeing how narrow minded you were. The moral of the story? Test before you code! You fill find yourself with more time, and less headaches.

export PATH=$HOME/jruby/bin:$PATH

Next install the Celerity gem in jRuby (we are using the github version rather than the ruby forge version, as it provides a later version):

jruby -S gem install jarib-celerity --source=http://gems.github.com

Now install the Culerity gem. This provides the interface between Celerity and your environment without forcing you to run in jRuby

 gem install langalex-culerity --source http://gems.github.com

Place this in your test environment:

# config/environments/test.rb
 
config.gem "langalex-culerity", :lib => false

I call :lib => false here to avoid loading the gem. This is done in the file generated by culerity. Finally remove features/steps/webrat_steps.rb as it will conflict with Culerity, and run:

script/generate culerity

Enjoy! Culerity should have very similar syntax to webrat, however keep in mind you may see some differences that you may need to adjust.

Create the Rails Project
Go to your projects directory and create a rails project. Just for fun, let’s call it ‘bank’:

Create MySQL Databases
Go into mysql and create the two databases that rails has set up the bank project to use:

Put Gems Into Environments
Edit the files

and

and add the following lines:

config.gem "cucumber", :version => '0.1.16'
config.gem "webrat", :version => '0.4.3'

This sets up the test and development environments to use cucumber. Since cucumber uses webrat to do the actual page navigation, we’ll need it too.

Install the Gems
Install the gems referenced in your environments:

You’ll see output that says that the gems were installed, if you didn’t have them already.

Bootstrap Cucumber
Do a:

You will see the following:

This generates some default cucumber files and directories that the project will use.

Generate Basic Files with scaffold
Do a:

You will see the following output:

If you haven’t done the tutorial on setting up RSpec and Factory Girl, then your output will look different to reflect the fact that most of the files that scaffold tried to create didn’t already exist.

Create the .feature File
Create

and fill it with:

Feature: Manage bank accounts
  In order to manage bank accounts and retain customers
  Bank Managers
  want to be able to manipulate bank accounts

  Scenario: See all bank accounts
    When I go to bank_accounts
    Then I should see "Listing bank_accounts"

Something you should know is that Cucumber will try to match each line of each scenario to a step definition. In other words, you can’t just put whatever you want in the scenario. If I put “When I go to the page bank_accounts” then that would not work because there is no step definition that matches that pattern. To see the step definitions, go to

and notice the line that says:

When /^I go to (.+)$/ do |page_name|
  visit path_to(page_name)
end

This is what will make my “When I go to bank_accounts” in my scenario work. If what is in my scenario doesn’t match one of the step definitions, it won’t work. You can’t just put whatever you want into the scenario unless you have made a step definition for it.

Note: If you are using Netbeans, check out this post about a plugin that will put color into your .feature files

Run Cucumber (unsuccessfully) and Then Fix
Do a:

and you should see

What this is complaining about is in the scenario when it says “When I go to bank_accounts” it doesn’t know where the bank_accounts page is. The paths are defined in the file

Open it up and change it to:

def path_to(page_name)
  case page_name
 
  when /the homepage/i
    root_path
  when /bank_accounts/i
    bank_accounts_path
  # Add more page name => path mappings here
 
  else
    raise "Can't find mapping from \"#{page_name}\" to a path."
  end
end

Notice that we added another path mapping for bank_accounts. It already had one for the homepage, meaning in our scenario we could have put “When I go to the homepage” and it would have worked on that line of the scenario.

Run Cucumber (successfully)
Do a:

and you should see

There, you’ve not got Cucumber working and can (hopefully) start writing other tests for it.