Cucumbers and forests

Question

I am just learning Cucumber and BDD for building applications. When I begin to study rails using http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ I use scaffolding to generate CRUD and skeleton functionality for my controllers and views. This method gives me a lot of speedup compared to regular PHP writing code. But when I look for cucumber screencasts, read comments about BDD or look at the https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora source code - they all do not use scaffolding. When I try to write tests, I spent a lot of time writing and testing, but I know that the basic code generated by the scaffold is not broken. This is my question: how to compromise between BDD and scaffold speed?

Answer 1

Forests provide a good starting point as you explore the TDD / BDD cycle. I found that when I first read the RSpec Book , it was confusing what to use when and why! Then came the Book of Cucumbers , which helps a little more, as it speeds up the process a bit (although the book is still in beta testing, but a fantastic resource).

Another great resource that has helped become Sarah May's blog entry called Outside-in BDD: How? What you like about this post is a discussion of the flow and style that you use as a developer. This was useful because it puts some context in the BDD style, and not just the re-hash of the main example.

Of course, there is the usual debate that “real programmers” should not use the scaffold. This may be true for a large-scale production application. The reality is that we all need to learn and start somewhere, and Rails is no exception; it is a large structure, and as soon as you add to RSpec + Cucumber, the width and depth grow very quickly.