JoeSniff

I’ve been developing multiple systems using Rspec stories for a little while now. There are a lot of great resources to get you started with a taste of what you can do with stories. Some of the resources I found useful where:

• http://peepcode.com/products/rspec-user-stories
• http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2008/6/16/slides-from-railsconf
• http://www.benmabey.com/2008/02/04/rspec-plain-text-stories-webrat-chunky-bacon/
• http://dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story
• http://evang.eli.st/blog/2007/10/8/story-runner-top-to-bottom-screencast

However once I had understood the basic idea I struggled to find practical examples and general guidance on writing real stories. So I’ve collected some of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way with story examples taken from real systems and how I’ve improved them as I learnt. Most examples are from web based applications.

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Rspec-rails is a rails plugin which brings the Rspec Ruby Behaviour Driven Development framework to rails along with some rails specific helpers. One of these hugely useful helper functions is:

mock_model(model_class, options_and_stubs = {})

This creates a mock object with the common methods stubbed out. It also allows you to specify other methods you want to stub.
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When using Rspec stories you have plain text stories which we call the ’story’ file and the ’story steps’ file that maps the plain text story to programmatic code. Generally you end up with your story files not being DRY. This is not a worry, your stories are the domain specific languages detailing your acceptance/integration tests. Its like saying that your Rails Models are not DRY because they repeat lots of 'has_one'!
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