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ChessTDD 27: Parameterized Acceptance Tests and Scenarios

At this point, I’m not going to bother with excuses any longer and I’ll just apologize for the gaps in between these posts.  But, I will continue to stick with it, even if it takes a year; I rarely get to program in C# anymore, so it’s fun when I do.  In this episode, I got a bit more sophisticated in the use of SpecFlow and actually got the acceptance tests into what appears to be reasonable shape moving forward.  I’m drawing my knowledge of Specflow from this Pluralsight course.  It’s a big help.

Here’s what I accomplish in this clip:

  • Implemented a new SpecFlow feature.
  • Discovered that the different SpecFlow features can refer to the same C# class.
  • Implemented parameterized spec flow components and then scenarios.
  • Got rid of the “hello world-ish” feature that I had created to get up to speed in favor of one that’s a lot more useful.

Here are some lessons to take away:

  • When using new tools, you’re going to flounder a bit before the aha! moments.  That’s okay and it happens to everyone.
  • As your understanding of tooling and your environment evolves, be sure to evolve with it.  Don’t remain rigid.
  • Fight the urge to copy and paste.  It’s always a fight myself, but on the occasion that I don’t have a better solution right in the moment, getting a test green, than duplicating code, I force myself to feel the pain and re-type it.  This helps me remember I’m failing and that I need to make corrections.
  • When I got my bearings in SpecFlow and realized that I had things from the example that I didn’t actually need, I deleted them forthwith.  You can always add stuff back later, but don’t leave things you don’t need laying around.
  • Notice how much emphasis I placed throughout the clip on getting back to green as frequently as possible.  I could have parameterized everything wholesale in a broad refactoring, but I broke it up, checking for green as frequently as possible.
  • Sometimes sanity checks are necessary, especially when you don’t really know what you’re doing.  I was not clear on why 8 was succeeding, since I was querying for a piece off the board.  Just to make sure that I wasn’t messing up the setup and it was never even checking for 8, I added that exception in temporarily.  Use those types of checks to make sure you’re not tilting at windmills.  As I’ve said, getting red when you expect red is important.
  • No matter what you’re doing, always look to be refactoring and consolidating to keep your code tight.