Packaging Cucumber step definitions for reuse

Monday, September 20, 2010

So I’ve been doing a bunch of BDD development these days using Cucumber as a starting point.

While working with client, the question came up about how they could share step definitions across multiple teams of developers.

I then remembered that the Aruba gem is just that, a collection of Cucumber step definitions.

So if you are looking for a way to start packaging up those step definitions that you have used on multiple projects and are tired of copying across projects, check out how the Aruba gem does it and go from there.

Thanks to the Cucumber and Aruba folks for sharing some very useful technology that allows us all to raise the bar when it comes to delivering quality software.

Testing Rails3 Generators using Cucumber and Aruba

Mike Gehard

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

In an effort to continue my contributions to the open source Ruby/Rails ecosystem, I decided to help the factory_girl_rails team move the Rails3 generators from the rails3-generators project into the factory_girl_rails project.

Like all good Ruby/Rails developers, they asked to make sure that I had tests written around the generators. I thought for a bit on how I was going to do this and then I wandered across the Cucumber feature files in the rspec-rails repo and found my answer.

Rspec-rails (and RSpec2 as well) uses a gem called Aruba to easily write Cucumber features around things that happen from the command line.

If you’d like to check out the result of using Cucumber and Aruba to test Rails3 generators, head over to my fork of the factory_girl_rails gem and check out the features/generators.feature file.

Hopefully the changes will be merged into the official factory_girl_rails repo soon and the generators will live closer to home.