Macro to aid BDD test naming style
Written September 04, 2007 at 10:20 MDT Tagged programming
During the DevTeach seminar that occured in Montreal in May I got an awesome opportunity to pair deliver a TDD workshop with Scott Bellware. One of the things he got me hooked on was using natural sentences as a test naming convention. So instead of this:
ShouldBeAbleToTransferFundsBetweenAccounts
You write it out like this:
Should be able to transfer funds between accounts.
Of course, only one of these is legitimate from a compilation perspective. So Scott had written a macro that would replace all of the spaces in the test name with underscore. You invoked it by highlighting the name of the test and hitting a key combination that was bound to the macro. Which would convert the natural sentence to the following:
Should_be_able_to_transfer_funds_between_accounts.
During the last course, Terry Hughes improved upon the macro so that now all I have to do is type out the name of the test and hit ALT + _ (that is what I have the macro bound to). I don't need to select the name of the test.
It is a subtle change, but one that allows me to just write out the name of my test without worrying about camel casing or underscores.
Here is the macro:
This video shows the macro in action.
Enjoy