A colleague asked me if I knew anything about Specification by example. I knew nothing but thought the name sounded familiar.
It was familiar. It was the title of a Manning book that I had seen in a ‘Deal of the day’ email. My curiosity engaged, I started to find out what it was about.
The idea sounded good and increasingly relevant to my day-to-day activities. I bought the book. Now the book is a review of 50 case studies into the use of specification by example. If you want technical details this is not the book for you. If you are a typical developer this is probably not the book for you. If however you are someone who can influence the requirements specification phase or just someone who wants to better their own process with the hope it will spread outwards from yourself then the book is useful …
… if you already have experience in automated testing. If not, like me the book will basically be entirely theoretical. Not great for a practitioner to use!
I know the theory of automated testing and its uses and benefits but have not been fortunate enough to work somewhere that actually uses it. For me the sticking point in applying what I have learnt from ‘Specification by Example’ is realising how to test business requirements in an automated way. I am aware of Selenium and other such web application testing tools but have never seen a test case.
So how do I get to see Specification by Example working. I need to understand Cucumber as this is a tool for testing business requirements. Oh! I guess I will need to know some Ruby to get started with Cucumber. The trouble is I am a Java developer who works for business clients on corporate machines, i.e. Windows platforms. Most clever web stuff seems to live in the realm of Linux until some helpful community member creates the Windows installer. Fortunately Git seems simple enough and even publishes a very good tutorial for SVN users.
At last some overlap between my experience and the suggested domain.
Well I have Git, which got me Ruby (with Windows devKit) and then Cumber. Now I just need to try it all out
Software Development 