Playing around with NBehave

As I said recently I'm still exploring tdd and its capabilities. The next evolutionary step could be bdd. Therefore I downloaded NBehave and I tried to write one story with it. Passive View is my preferred playground and thats how it goes with NBehave and TypeMock.NET:

First the declaration of the View, the Presenter and a Service-Gateway that is used by the Presenter to retrieve some information.

protected IView _view;
protected Presenter _presenter;
protected EventHandler _updateRequestedEvent;
protected IServiceGateway _serviceGatway;

The setup of the this objects is not showed here. It simples instantiates mocks for the View and the ServiceGateway and injects it into the Presenter using Constructor-Injection. The _updateRequestedEvent is a mocked event on the view and is also used later in the example.

First I have to specify a story. This is done like that:

[TestFixtureSetUp]
public void FixtureSetup()
{
    _getCurrentTimeStory = new Story("Getting the current service time");
    _getCurrentTimeStory.AsA("User").IWant("to update the displayed current time")                
                        .SoThat("I can see what time is on the serivce side");
}

And that's one scenario that came in my mind:

[Test]
public void HelloNTServiceIsNotAvailable()
{
      using (RecordExpectations recorder = RecorderManager.StartRecording())
      {
          _view.ShowMessageBox("The Service is currently not available");
          recorder.CheckArguments();
      }
      _getCurrentTimeStory.WithScenario("Service is not available")
           .Given("the Service returns an exception", new Exception("Error"), e =>
              {
                 using (RecordExpectations recorder = RecorderManager.StartRecording))
                 {
                    recorder.ExpectAndThrow(_serviceGatway.GetTime(), e);
                 }
              })
           .When("I update the current time", () => _updateRequestedEvent(this, EventArgs.Empty))
           .Then("a message box should display", "The Service is currently not available", m =>
              {
                   MockManager.Verify();
              })
        ;
}

Looks quite chaotic and a developer not used to NUnit,TypeMock and NBehave might not understand it at first glance. I also think the combination of NUnit,TypeMock and NBehave is a little bit strange as they do not integrate very well. Maybe there is another way how to combine those frameworks?

But what I like is the overall structure that it gives to the tests and the readable test output that can be interpreted by a product owner. Here are now the scenario above and another scenario that I could present to him:

Story: Getting the current service time

Narrative:
As a User
I want to update the displayed current time
So that I can see what time is on the serivce side

Scenario 1: Service is not available
Given the Service returns an exception: System.Exception: Error
When I update the current time
Then a message box should display: The Service is currently not available

Scenario 2: Service is available
Given the Service returns the time: 01.01.2000 12:24:23
When I update the current time
Then the label on the view should display: 12:24