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Drive development with easyb

Embrace collaborative development with an intuitive domain-specific language

developerWorks

Level: Intermediate

Andrew Glover (ajglover@gmail.com), Author and developer

05 Nov 2008

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A disconnect between the stakeholders who define requirements and the developers who implement them has long plagued software development. In recent years, frameworks based on dynamic languages and domain-specific languages (DSLs) have tried to bridge the stakeholder-developer gap by making code read more like normal language. This tutorial shows how easyb — which provides a more natural DSL that is closely attuned to stakeholders — helps developers and stakeholders collaborate effectively.

In this tutorial

easyb is a behavior-driven development (BDD) framework for the Java™ platform. By using a specification-based DSL, easyb aims to enable executable yet readable documentation. You write easyb specifications in Groovy and execute them via a Java runner that can be invoked through the command line, Apache Maven 2, or Apache Ant. With easyb, you can verify the behavior of anything you write in Java code, in a more natural way. When you are done with the tutorial, you'll understand the benefits of collaborative stories implemented with easyb and how this framework makes collaboration easy.


Objectives

  • Define stories and scenarios using the stakeholder's own words

  • Implement them with easyb

  • Practice the true intentions of test-driven development (TDD) through BDD

Prerequisites

To get the most from this tutorial, you should be familiar with Java syntax and the basic concepts of object-oriented development on the Java platform. You should also be familiar with refactoring and normal unit testing.


System requirements

To follow along and try out the code for this tutorial, you need a working installation of either:

You also need easyb and Apache Ant. The tutorial includes download links and installation instructions for easyb and Ant.

The recommended system configuration for this tutorial is:

  • A system supporting either the Sun JDK 1.5.0_09 (or later) or the IBM JDK 1.5.0 SR3 with at least 500MB of main memory
  • At least 20MB of disk space to install the software components and examples covered

The instructions and examples in the tutorial are based on a Microsoft® Windows® operating system. All the tools covered in the tutorial also work on Linux® and UNIX® systems.



Duration

1 hour


Formats

html, pdf


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