Ease your SpecFlow pain with SpecSalad

By Mike Hanson at April 04, 2012 16:41
Filed Under: BDD, Acceptance Testing, Testing, Test Runners, SpecFlow

Just finished a contract where we used SpecFlow to define our acceptance tests, and I have been using it on my personal projects for a while.  Anyone using SpecFlow for a while quickly learns that you have to be careful how you organise your step definitions or you can get in a real mess.  It is a great tool but if you tend to just dive in without first finding out the best practice it can be painful.

 

Recently I discovered SpecSalad.  Duncan Butler has ported CukeSalad over to .NET for us and I for one am glad he did.  Basically SpecSalad takes the pain away by allowing you to define your system as a set of Roles and Tasks.  Steps are replaced by the Task and as each one is a separate class it is much easier to keep track or reuse.  I won’t regurgitate the “how to” as Duncan has some great posts on his blog to get you started.

 

SpecSalad necessarily constrains the vocabulary you must use, but this has a cool side effect of making it easier for new adopters of BDD to learn the vocabulary.  On my last project the vocabulary was somewhat of a hurdle for the business to getting on board and defining the acceptance tests, for much of it we the developers were defining acceptance tests after the fact, never a good thing in my book.

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