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Page 4 of 4
Running easyb
The previous sections illustrated how easy it is to capture behaviors of varying levels of granularity with easyb. But in order for these specifications to provide the most value, they will need to be executed as a part of the development process and build system.
During a development episode, easyb specifications can be run by setting up an external tool configuration in your IDE or, if you happen to use IntelliJ IDEA, by installing the IntelliJ easyb plugin. The process of getting an external tool up and running varies across IDEs, but generally involves setting up a run configuration that places the easyb JARs on the classpath and then invokes the easyb behavior runner's main method, passing a list of space-separated specifications to run. The IntelliJ plugin simplifies this process by allowing specifications to be run in the same manner as JUnit tests, and provides graphical reporting of results in addition to the behavior runner's console output. Figure 1 below shows the output of executing an easyb story in IntelliJ using the easyb plugin. This story was run just as a JUnit test would have been, and the results of the story are similar in form as well. (Click the image to enlarge it.)
Figure 1. Running an easyb story in IntelliJ using the easyb IntelliJ plugin is as simple as running a JUnit test
easyb also provides an Ant task and a Maven plugin with which you can run easyb specifications as a part of the build process. These both cause the build to fail if a non-pending specification or story fails, and can optionally generate story reports that contain story narrative and acceptance scenarios apart from the closures that bind them to the system.
Tooling is an important component of any development environment, and the tooling around easyb is already good and grows more and more so each day.
In conclusion
In this brief overview of easyb, you have explored the language's approach to BDD and seen how it helps you think about your system as a collection of behaviors across various levels of granularity. By keeping the focus on behaviors instead of tests for specific classes and methods, BDD -- and easyb -- encourage you to write tests that are more descriptive of what the system should do and less tightly coupled to particular implementations.
Additionally, easyb's approach for capturing user stories is less restrictive than the programmer-oriented syntaxes of comparable tools. easyb aims to stay out of the way of the story-writing process so that the center of attention is on the conversation taking place, not on the tool that is being used to capture that conversation. Furthermore, easyb does make it easy to bind these expressions of behavior to the system under test as a mechanism for validating the conversations.
As easyb draws closer to its 1.0 launch, now is a great time to give it a test drive and see for yourself how BDD and easyb can help you build better systems that more closely match your customers' needs.
About the author
Rod Coffin is a principal consultant at Improving Enterprises, which provides training, consulting, and outsourcing services. He has over 10 years of professional software development experience across a wide variety of industries, technologies, and roles. He has coached and mentored several teams on agile software development and is equally passionate about the organizational and technical sides of effective software development. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and has written many articles on a range of software development topics, including agility, enterprise software development, and semantics.Read more about Tools & Methods in JavaWorld's Tools & Methods section.
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More about easyb
- easyb is implemented as a DSL written in Groovy.
- Check out the easyb homepage, where you can read the documentation for the easyb DSL.
- For more about DSLs, including easyb, read Venkat Subramaniam's four-part "Creating DSLs in Java" series on JavaWorld:
- "What is a domain-specific language?" (June 2008)
- "Fluency and context" (July 2008)
- "Internal and external DSLs" (August 2008)
- Learn more about what Groovy offers Java-based developers by listening to the recent JavaWorld podcast with AboutGroovy Editor Scott Davis.
- easyb champion Andrew Glover wrote about BDD (and JBehave) for his IBM developerWorks series In pursuit of code quality.
- Dan North has also written two excellent articles about BDD: "Introducing BDD" and "What's in a story?"
- Java Power Tools author John Smart has blogged about the Maven plugin for easyb.
- Why is unit testing waning among Java developers? Join the discussion in JW Blogs. Also read "JUnit still not dead" (InfoQ, August 2008 ).
Related technologies and downloads
- Download the IntelliJ easyb plugin and learn more about how it works.
- Install the easyb Ant task.
- JBehave, JDave, and RSpec are BDD frameworks.
- Fit, Fitnesse, and Green Pepper are executable documentation tools in the same broad class as easyb.
More
- Visit JavaWorld's Tools & Methods research center for more articles about tools like easyb and programming methods like BDD.
- JavaWorld's community platform is growing: Check out JW Blogs and the improved Java Q&A Forums.
- Also see Network World's IT Buyer's Guides: Side-by-side comparison of hundreds of products in over 70 categories.