In my previous post I talked a bit about Behaviour Driven Development and RSpec’s beautiful syntax for writing specifications.

This week I stumbled upon acceptance testing in RSpec and a very pretty way of writing those tests.

A simple acceptance test would look like this:

Story: A user sends an invitation

The invitation page should allow users to invite friends

Scenario: Sending an invitation
Given a new unused email
When the user goes to /invite/create
And the user types 'Test' into the invite_name field
And the user types 'User' into the invite_surname field
And the user types 'someemail@email.com' into the invite_email field
And the user clicks the commit button
Then the page should contain the text 'Test User was invited'

Scenario: Sending an invitation to an already used email address
Given an already used email address someemail@email.com
When the user goes to /invite/create
And the user types 'Test' into the invite_name field
And the user types 'User' into the invite_surname field
And the user types 'someemail@email.com' into the invite_email field
And the user clicks the commit button
Then the page should contain the text 'Email already exists'

Now these tests don’t do anything by themselves, you need to run them against the application.
This is where Selenium comes in. Using RSpec’s story runner, you can feed these plain-text stories to Selenium.

Selenium will open your web application in a browser and go to URL’s, enter data, click buttons/checkboxes/radiobuttons. It’s kinda spooky to see your browser navigate to pages by itself

Here’s another test that checks the login function

Story: A user logs in

Scenario: Logging in fails
Given a user with username 'Arie' and password 'test'
When the user goes to /login
And the user types 'Arie' into the login field
And the user types 'not-test' into the password field
And the user clicks the commit button
Then the page should contain the text 'Unable to login'

Scenario: Logging in successfully
Given a user with username 'Arie' and password 'test'
When the user goes to /login
And the user types 'Arie' into the login field
And the user types 'test' into the password field
And the user clicks the commit button
Then the page should contain the text 'Logged in'

For now I’m not planning on covering my entire application with tests like this. I’m just going to make a few tests that I can show to my school when I finish my internship.