JBehave in Practice

ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) is the extension of TDD,which helps us deliver exactly what the customer wants. Now ATDD has already been the hot spot in the software development world. There are several variations of ATDD including BDD,EDD and etc,also more and more frameworks have been created to help us develop with ATDD,for example FIT and JBehave.

The followings will introduce how to use the JBehave in your real project effectively.

figure 1 Test Code Structure

Each test implementation Could be divided into four layers,this structure Could help us improve the codes reusability and maintainability,So,it will make us implement the tests quickly and easily.

Specification/Scenario layer:

This layer describes system’s behaviors and functionalities by the scenarios. For using JBehave,we can use the natural language describe the scenarios and just need to follow the JBehave ‘Given-When-Then’ rule.

Parser layer:

We don’t need to implement this layer,this layer has been implemented by JBehave. What exactly JBehave do is to relate the steps of the scenario to the methods of the test codes.

Step Logic Layer:

The layer implements test logics associating with every step of the scenarios. Every step are implemented by a Java method.

Action/Utils layer

This the very important layer to improve the reusability of our codes. This layer provides the utility methods to help you implement step logics. These utility methods usually involved the system state checking,mock requests sending and so on.

For example,we can provide the methods to check the data in database/file or check the state of the middleware,also so frameworks are very useful to implement the logic simulating the client browser’s requests.

Chao Cai(蔡超）

working for Amazon.com

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