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Developer and co-designer of StoryQ here

Sorry it took me so long to find your post! I feel so slack. I think I’m going to go and set up a google alert right now…

I’ve been getting back on a a bit of a StoryQ bent now – having needed to build flit.codeplex.com before I could really do what I wanted with the new version of StoryQ (which is now released, and pretty well documented at storyq.codeplex.com).

The simple answer is that back when I built storyQ, NBehave didn’t integrate into the resharper test runner or teamcity well enough for us. We only had developers *writing* the tests, so it made sense to use an *internal* dsl… The first usable version only took two days to build (although I’ve put in a LOT more work since then, as I’m sure you have). Gallio didn’t exist either.

That’s the only reason we built our own system rather than helping you guys out with yours.

Fast forward to today, and I’d say that StoryQ and NBehave are both excellent .NET BDD Frameworks, each addressing a slightly different problem space / workflow. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend, use or contribute to NBehave if it seemed to fit the project better than StoryQ.

I have to apologise – back then, I wasn’t so good at community engagement and wasn’t a part of the BDD list on google groups. I hope you saw my post there regarding the new release!

Regards – Rob Fonseca-Ensor (@robfe)

The unit test frameworks are an interesting example, as you quite rightly point out there are many of them and they all seem to do the same thing. As Jeff points out each framework has different objectives but sure frameworks copy each other, once upon a time MbUnit was the only framework to have RowTest and Factory attributes – not any more. Soon even the concept of Pairwise will be copied. Do we mind, no, these concepts are open to be copied as much as the software we open up is. If folks find them useful and want them, who are we to stop them. MbUnit will be adding it’s own constraint model, it is a cool idea (and kudos to NUnits charlie poole for creating the concept) and folks will find it powerful and useful. That is the key to all that we do in this space, the framework serves its users.

The nature of OSS is rarely about sharing and almost always just do it (and wait for it to be copied). As someone points out here, if they have a need then either give them a way of letting them do it or supply them it. Better yet, if folks are working around problems with your framework, understand why and see if they can’t supply you with a patch or failing that the problem and how they solved it. OSS is peaks and troughs when it comes to activity and time and you can’t promise it will be done tommrow but at least it has exposure.

Andy

Finally, as someone else pointed out, getting to unit testing was a recent experience for them, and understanding and selling the benefits of that might in itself be an uphill task. Add to that that none of the BDD tooling sites that I have visited so far have been clear on why BDD is good for the developer, business analyst, or organization shows up as a disconnect between the development of the tooling and the ability to sell the benefits of using the tooling.

My opinions above are more reflective of a user of BDD tooling rather than as a developer of BDD tools, which is what the original post was all about, but I hope it will help when the idea of different developers coming together materializes.

The xUnit community has largely reached a consensus as regards to tests consisting of fixtures containing multiple test cases with with one or more assertions of which there is a moderate assortment involving validation of state and behavior.

So why have MbUnit, NUnit, xUnit.Net, CSUnit, MSTest, and more all within the .Net space?

Well, because each framework differs in how the general concepts have been applied. There is significant engineering effort involved here to optimize across a wide range of details.

MbUnit v3, for example, emphasizes rich reporting, extension by subclassing, broad applicability to unit testing and integration testing scenarios, and powerful integrated tooling.

Other projects emphasize other objectives. xUnit.Net is a fascinating study in minimalism, test semantics and language-oriented programming.

It’s FASCINATING to watch these ideas and systems develop!

Ironically, I just finished writing a reply to a query about providing enhanced database integration testing support in MbUnit.

I explicitly questioned whether this was something that really needed to be reinvented. Moreover, I cited an existing implementation of these ideas for inspiration (NDbUnit).

Before anything happens wrt. database integration testing in MbUnit, we’ll be sure to make a proper study of what’s out there, to decide our approach. I fully expect in this case that we will adopt someone else’s work, contribute enhancements, and build more cool stuff around it.

Unfortunately other time it turns out that the existing tools don’t meet out desires, but it’s always worth looking anyway because it can help us to better understand our true needs!

I am quite happy endorsing and supporting the excellent work of others.

I am also quite happy to borrow and learn from others when I perceive a significant opportunity for improvement in the form of a new implementation.

Anyways, that’s it. There’s no malice or neglect involved in choosing to rebuild a tool fashioned after those others have built before; there is only quiet respect and genuine admiration.

You mean we don’t have 12 grammar checkers for this little comment box already?

See, here’s the thing about being uninformed. You don’t *know* you are uninformed until someone points new information out to you. At which point, you become informed and, once again, don’t know that you are uninformed.

So there are three or four unit testing Fx for .NET. Why should I not write a fourth? Maybe I have an idea for doing things differently (a’la xUnit) that will make the process of writing unit tests easier/smarter/better.

I mean, should we have stopped with Xerox PARC? Why did Microsoft come out with .NET when Sun had already written Java? Do we need another GC framework that runs on Windows?

Shouldn’t we all be driving Model T’s 2008 edition? You have your choice of colors provided you choice black.

Understood I have been known to become very passionate from time to time.

You thoughts are completely inline with my vision on what would be great for the .Net community.

About the only thing I would like to add is that there is a mailing list I created a while back for BDD:

http://groups.google.com/group/behaviordrivendevelopment

pass it on. There has not been that much activity around it though.