BDD and Cucumber

In this homework you will create user stories to describe a feature of a SaaS app, use the Cucumber tool to turn those stories into executable acceptance tests, and run the tests against your SaaS app.

Specifically, you will write Cucumber scenarios that test the happy paths of parts 1-3 of the Rails Intro homework, in which you added filtering and sorting to RottenPotatoes' index view for Movies.

The app code in hw-bdd-cucumber/rottenpotatoes contains a "canonical" solution to the Rails Intro homework against which to write your scenarios, and the necessary scaffolding for the first couple of scenarios.

You may fork your own copy, or just clone this repo directly. If you clone it directly, you won't be able to push your code changes back from your IDE. Maybe that's OK with you. If you fork into your own GitHub account first and clone your fork, you can push your changes back to your github account. We recommend that you do a git commit as you get each part working.

Once you clone the repo, these commands should get you up and running:

$ cd hw-bdd-cucumber/rottenpotatoes
$ bundle install --without production
$ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec rake db:seed
$ bundle exec rake db:test:prepare

Also, make sure Cucumber is working by running the bundle exec cucumber command. You can also run individual features by specifying a filename with the cucumber command, such as bundle excec cucumber features/sort_movie_list.feature.

You may see deprecation warnings, which are shown below. While ugly, you can ignore these for the assignment. They just mean that the step definitions are using an old method called .should, and need to be updated to use .expect eventually.

DEPRECATION: Using `should` from rspec-expectations' old `:should` 
syntax without explicitly enabling the syntax is deprecated. Use 
the new `:expect` syntax or explicitly enable `:should` with 
`config.expect_with(:rspec) { |c| c.syntax = :should }` instead. 
Called from /home/ubuntu/workspace/hw-bdd-cucumber/rottenpotatoes
/features/step_definitions/web_steps.rb:107:in `block in <top 
(required)>'.

Part 1: Create a declarative scenario step for adding movies

The goal of BDD is to express behavioral tasks rather than low-level operations. We keep the scenarios declarative with solid, state-describing steps and accopmlish the low-level operations behind the scenes with step definitions. In addition to the lowest-level step definitions found in web_steps.rb (the ones that facilitate clicking a button or filling in a text box), we will supply movie-specific step definitions in a separate movie_steps.rb file. These movie step definitions serve as a middle layer of abstraction between the declarative scenario steps and the web step definitions.

The background step of all the scenarios in this homework requires that the movies database contain some movies. Analogous to the explanation in Section 4.7, it would go against the goal of BDD to do this by writing scenarios that spell out every interaction required to add a new movie, since adding new movies is not what these scenarios are about.

Recall that the Given steps of a user story specify the initial state of the system: it does not matter how the system got into that state. For part 1, therefore, you will create a step definition that will match the step Given the following movies exist in the Background section of both sort_movie_list.feature and filter_movie_list.feature. (Later in the course, we will show how to DRY out the repeated Background sections in the two feature files.)

Add your code in the movie_steps.rb step definition file. You can just use ActiveRecord calls to directly add movies to the database; it`s OK to bypass the GUI associated with creating new movies, since that's not what these scenarios are testing.

SUCCESS is when all Background steps for the scenarios in filter_movie_list.feature and sort_movie_list.feature are passing Green.

Part 2: Happy paths for filtering movies

1. Complete the scenario restrict to movies with PGorR ratings in filter_movie_list.feature. You can use existing step definitions in web_steps.rb to check and uncheck the appropriate boxes, submit the form, and check whether the correct movies appear (and just as importantly, movies with unselected ratings do not appear). But to make the solution more declarative, consider tips A, B, and C below.

A. Since it's tedious to repeat steps such as When I check the 'PG' checkbox, And I check the 'R' checkbox, etc., create a movie_steps.rb step definition to match a step such as: When I check the following ratings: G PG R or When I uncheck the following ratings: PG-13 R This single step definition should only check the specified boxes, and leave the other boxes as they were. HINT: this step definition can reuse existing steps in web_steps.rb , as shown in the example in Section 7.9 in ESaaS.

B. COnsider adding a movie_steps.rb step definition for seeing a list of specific movies in the same form that you list a series of checkboxes to check in tip A above. For instance: Then I should see the following movies: or Then I should not see the following movies:. You can use the string split method to parse the list of movies just like you did the ratings, and you can feed the titles into the web step I should see or I should not see. See the definitions of the web steps for ways to make one step definition handle both cases.

C. For the scenario all ratings selected, it would be tedious to use And I should see to name every single movie. That would detract from the goal of BDD to convey the behavioral intent of the user story. To fix this, create step definitions that will match steps of the form: Then I should see all of the movies in movie_steps.rb. HINT: One way to tackle this is to retrieve the list of all movies from the model, map their titles into an iterable collection, and delegate to the web step I should see with each title. Another (slicker) option is to consider counting the number of rows in the table to implement these steps. If you have computed rows as the number of table rows, you can use the assertion rows.should == value to fail the test in case the values don't match. Update: You no longer need to implement the scenario for no ratings selected.

2. Use your new step definitions to complete the scenario all ratings selected. SUCCESS is when all scenarios in filter_movie_list.feature pass with all steps green.

Part 3: Happy paths for sorting movies by title and by release date

1. Since the scenarios in sort_movie_list.feature involve sorting, you will need the ability to have steps that test whether one movie appears before another in the output listing. Create a movie_steps.rb step definition that matches a step such as Then I should see "Aladdin" before "Amelie". There is a hint in the slides for checking the relative order of strings using a regexp.

2. Once you finish the step definition, complete the scenarios in sort_movie_list.feature to check for movies sorted by date and by title. Use your new step definition.

HINTS

• page is the Capybara method that returns an object representing the page returned by the app server. You can use it in expectations such as expect(page).to have_content('Hello World'). More importantly, you can search the page for specific elements matching CSS selectors or XPath expressions; see the Capybara documentation under Querying.
• page.body is the page's HTML body as one giant string.
• A regular expression could capture whether one string appears before another in a larger string, though that's not the only possible strategy.

SUCCESS is all steps of all scenarios in both feature files passing Green.

Submission

To submit your assignment, follow instructions from your professor specific to your class. Your submission should reflect all changes you made to the .feature files and movie_steps.rb, and any other changed files, and may include verification of your cucumber output.