A quick evaluation of testing frameworks: Rbehave

My company is developing it's product using the web framework Ruby on Rails, developed by 37signals. This framework contains good support for regular unit testing but SoundCloud decided to use the behavior-driven framework Rspec for their testing. (For more on behavior-driven-testing, bdd, read by blog post about it here).

This framework originally has no support for integration testing but in the next release they will integrate rbehave which is a nice framework for writing "user story"-like tests. (User story beeing the agile version of use cases, which are formulated as a short story). Here comes an example of rbehave from another blog

Story "View Home Page", %{
As a user
I want to view my home page
So that I can get a birds eye view of the system
}, :type => RailsStory do

Scenario "Publisher with no videos" do
Given "a company named", "No Videos" do |name|
@company = Company.create! :name => name
end

And "a user named", "novideos" do |login|
@user = create_user login
end

And "the user belongs to", "company", "No Videos" do |klass, company_name|
@user.update_attribute :company, klass.classify.constantize.find_by_name(company_name)
end

And "logged in as", "novideos" do |login|
post "/sessions", :login => login, :password => "test"
end

When "visiting", "/" do |page|
get_via_redirect page
end

Then "viewer should see", "companies/show_initial" do |template|
response.should render_template(template)
end
end

The rbehave framework, which essentially is a port of the user-story based java testing framework Jbehave, is very fresh and most likely still has some problems. It seems for example, by reading a couple of blog posts (such as this) , that there could be a bit of a problem to get the framework to work with Continues Integration (CI) which soundcloud uses.

Otherwise this seems like an ideal framework to use, and as soon as the next release of Rspec we will start using it I think. (Maybe even sooner )