Question

I’ve encountered JBehave recently and I think we should use it. So I have called in the tester of our team and he also thinks that this should be used.

With that as starting point I have asked the tester to write stories for a test application (the Bowling Game Kata of Uncle Bob). At the end of the day we would try to map his tests against the bowling game.

I was expecting a test like this:

Given a bowling game
When player rolls 5
And player rolls 4
Then total pins knocked down is 9

Instead, the tester came with ‘logical tests’, in other words he was not being that specific. But, in his terms this was a valid test.

Given a bowling game
When player does a regular throw
Then score should be calculated appropriately

My problem with this is ambiguity, what is a ‘regular throw’? What is ‘appropriately’? What will it mean when one of those steps fail?

However, the tester says that a human does understand and that what I was looking for where ‘physical tests’, which where more cumbersome to write.

I could probably map ‘regular’ with rolling two times 4 (still no spare, nor strike), but it feels like I am again doing a translation I don’t want to make.

So I wonder, how do you approach this? How do you write your JBehave tests? And do you have any experience when it is not you who writes these tests, and you have to map them to your code?

Answer 1

The amount of explicitness needed in acceptance criteria depends on level of trust between the development team and the business stakeholders.

In your example, the business is assuming that the developers/testers understand enough about bowling to determine the correct outcome.

But imagine a more complex domain, like finance. For that, it would probably be better to have more explicit examples to ensure a good understanding of the requirement.

Alternatively, let’s say you have a scenario:

Given I try to sign up with an invalid email address
Then I should not be registered

For this, a developer/tester probably has better knowledge of what constitutes a valid or invalid email address than the business stakeholder does. You would still want to test against a variety of addresses, but that can be specified within the step definitions, rather than exposing it at the scenario level.