Hi,
The customer is not happy about writing Stories in a text editor.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is anyone using a wiki, spreadsheet,
or word document and automatically converting to a text file?
Thanks
Aidy
Are you pairing with them? Can you not just drive and do the typing,
asking them questions all the while to keep them engaged?
I think David is cooking something up (have a look at his blog) but it
might be a while coming.
If you can find a Mac, the TextMate text editor has nice syntax
highlighting (thanks to Ben M.) that make it look a bit prettier.
As Matt said there is no specalised tool for editing Features (Though
textmate is great with Bens bundle).
If you checkout Cucumbers Milestone 0.2 you will notice ’ Provide a
REST/AtomPub interface to Cucumber’. The idea of having some sort of
wiki interface is something thats in the works for Cucumber, no
quantifiable deadlines yet though I’m afraid.
–
Joseph W.
http://www.joesniff.co.uk
Hi Matt,
How are you?
On 07/11/2008, Matt W. [email protected] wrote:
Are you pairing with them? Can you not just drive and do the typing, asking
them questions all the while to keep them engaged?
Cucumber is now the standard here, with all projects using it. The
guys who were using Watin have now moved to Watir.
In most conditions, I will pair with the customer. In other projects
the BA has been writing the acceptance criteria.
I saw an example today in Excel; using the Given, When, Then format.
I think David is cooking something up (have a look at his blog) but it
might be a while coming.
Thanks for heads up.
If you can find a Mac, the TextMate text editor has nice syntax
highlighting (thanks to Ben M.) that make it look a bit prettier.
As you know Matt a majority of users here are using Windows, but I
could ask for a Mac. I would be grateful if you could send me a
screenshot.
Thanks
Aidy
On 7 Nov 2008, at 14:42, aidy lewis wrote:
On 07/11/2008, Matt W. [email protected] wrote:
Are you pairing with them? Can you not just drive and do the
typing, asking
them questions all the while to keep them engaged?Cucumber is now the standard here, with all projects using it. The
guys who were using Watin have now moved to Watir.
Awesome! Looks like we snuck Ruby in!
You should give Aslak a quote for the website - having the BBC on
there will definitely give Cucumber some more gravitas.
In most conditions, I will pair with the customer. In other projects
the BA has been writing the acceptance criteria.I saw an example today in Excel; using the Given, When, Then format.
It would be pretty trivial to write something to copy excel to plain
text, but why bother? What’s wrong with notepad?
could ask for a Mac. I would be grateful if you could send me a
screenshot.
Will do off-list, and we can catch up. Are you coming to XP day?
Matt W. wrote:
Are you pairing with them? Can you not just drive and do the typing,
asking them questions all the while to keep them engaged?I think David is cooking something up (have a look at his blog) but it
might be a while coming.If you can find a Mac, the TextMate text editor has nice syntax
highlighting (thanks to Ben M.) that make it look a bit prettier.
You can now also get syntax highlighting in vim:
I would really like to see a non-technical stakeholder try to use vim.
-Ben
Hi,
The customer is not happy about writing Stories in a text editor.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is anyone using a wiki, spreadsheet,
or word document and automatically converting to a text file?
There will be custom editors/wikis with aides like code completion,
nice visuals, running etc. Kinda like FitNesse, but nicer.
The plan is to make a RESTful API for Cucumber. I’m thinking a Sinatra
web app that uses the Cucumber CLI and exposes it with AtomPub or a
similar JSON api. The server would be part of the Cucumber gem, and
can be started up with a single command on any machine.
From there I hope to see people developing richer clients like
standalone web apps, wikis, wiki plugins, Flex/Air apps, editor and
IDE plugins, hell, word and excel plugins in VB.NET even!
My experience tells me you can’t get the customer/business to be comfy
in a simple text editor. I have accepted that as a fact it’s not worth
working around in most cases. Kudos to those who can, I know some
teams succeed.
I have talked to a student who’s working on the REST part as part of
his thesis. Please work with him if he shows up here on the list.
In order to successfuly make a usable REST API/server I will focus the
next weeks and months on improving Cucumber internals. Part of that is
an AST that will make manipulation of features, scenarios, tables and
steps easier, as well as a better data structure for output and errors.
I have started this work and I’m trying out different ideas. I expect
to make some visible progress before the end of the year.
Then I expect all the Cucumber forkers to take it and run. Thanks for
all the great contributions so far folks!
Aslak
Ben M. wrote:
You can now also get syntax highlighting in vim:
GitHub - bmabey/vim-cucumber: Vim helpers for working with Cucumber featuresI would really like to see a non-technical stakeholder try to use vim.
-Ben
I know its terribly 20th century but you could use a pen and paper
I’ve started doing this a lot more now we have a 21st century pen
(http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-io2-Digital-Writing-System/dp/B00064FXH0).
–
Joseph W.
http://www.joesniff.co.uk
On 7 Nov 2008, at 15:38, Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
nice visuals, running etc. Kinda like FitNesse, but nicer.
that is an AST that will make manipulation of features, scenarios,
tables and steps easier, as well as a better data structure for
output and errors.I have started this work and I’m trying out different ideas. I
expect to make some visible progress before the end of the year.Then I expect all the Cucumber forkers to take it and run. Thanks
for all the great contributions so far folks!
Very nice indeed.
If you can come up with some kind of mock suite for the API interface,
that might help us get going with something.
It would be really cool to have a web editor for features that doubles
as a textbook RSpec / Cucumber reference app to answer the FAQ
Fernando asked a few days ago (‘is there a good example of a rails app
using RSpec’). I’d love to collaborate on such a project.
cheers,
Matt
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:24 AM, aidy lewis [email protected]
wrote:
The customer is not happy about writing Stories in a text editor.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is anyone using a wiki, spreadsheet,
or word document and automatically converting to a text file?
As Aslak mentioned there are lots of tools to come, but I just figured
I’d throw out there that at weplay we pair with our customers on the
initial generation of the feature files, once that is done we’ve given
them a GitHub account and both the Business Owner and our QA will go
in and tweak the feature files from within the GitHub web-based
editor.
Obviously we’ve had to build up a level of trust on both ends, and
this level of integration didn’t come over night, but its nice to see
commits coming into the project from all members of the team (not just
developers).
Josh
On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 2:30 AM, David C.
[email protected]wrote:
I’d throw out there that at weplay we pair with our customers on the
Write a post commit hook to fire a message off to your build machine
and have it run all the scenarios and email you the results. Sometimes
everything will just pass. Sometimes you’ll know you have new work to
do.
Don’t we already have this with something like cruisecontrol.rb [1]?
Checkout the code from Github, set it up as a project in cruisecontrol.
On any commit it will run the build and send emails if there were
failures.
Where you thinking something different or am I missing something?
–
Joseph W.
http://www.joesniff.co.uk
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 8:53 PM, Josh K. [email protected]
wrote:
in and tweak the feature files from within the GitHub web-based
editor.
Holy crap! I didn’t know they had that.
Josh - thanks for pointing this out - this changes a LOT!
Next step …
Write a post commit hook to fire a message off to your build machine
and have it run all the scenarios and email you the results. Sometimes
everything will just pass. Sometimes you’ll know you have new work to
do.
Any takers?
And if you can train the business folk to make changes to their own
branch (or maybe give them all their own forks - might be simpler) …
man - this opens up a ton of opportunity.
Thanks for bringing this up.
Cheers,
David
On 8 Nov 2008, at 02:30, David C. wrote:
And if you can train the business folk to make changes to their own
branch (or maybe give them all their own forks - might be simpler) …
man - this opens up a ton of opportunity.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Assuming you have a stakeholder who can check changes to feature
files, you’re going to get a borked build sooner or later - it’s
unlikely they’ll change requirements and the code will magically
adjust itself! (not for a few years anyway!)
I guess like you say (and I hadn’t thought of this) the right idea is
to get the stakeholder to check in their changes in a different branch
to the one in which the developers are hacking on the actual changes.
That way you can have a build on the stakeholder branch which is often
broken, but the breakages are like a ‘todo list’ for the developers -
it’s basically your WIP. And you can have another build on the
developers’ branch which is sacred and people get the usual
punishments for breaking.
I think there’s a nice synergy to be had here between cucumber, git
and cruisecontrol.rb that will help you have a really lean workflow.
Very interesting.
cheers,
Matt
On 8 Nov 2008, at 17:33, Josh K. wrote:
cruisecontrol.rb already takes care of this for you.
So does your stakeholder break the build when this happens? Isn’t it
just broken most of the time in that case?
cheers,
Matt
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 9:30 PM, David C. [email protected]
wrote:
Next step …
Write a post commit hook to fire a message off to your build machine
and have it run all the scenarios and email you the results. Sometimes
everything will just pass. Sometimes you’ll know you have new work to
do.
cruisecontrol.rb already takes care of this for you.
–
Josh K.
phone: 509-979-1593
email: [email protected]
web: http://joshknowles.com
On Sat, Nov 8, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Matt W. [email protected] wrote:
So does your stakeholder break the build when this happens? Isn’t it just
broken most of the time in that case?
More often then not they end up just creating pending scenarios that
need to be implemented, as opposed to breaking the build. We have the
luxury of all being in the same room, so we try and communicate if
there are any questions or concerns on the changes that they are
making.
–
Josh K.
phone: 509-979-1593
email: [email protected]
web: http://joshknowles.com