4 posts tagged with "Screenplay"

Previously, we extracted our a simple implementation of the screenplay pattern from some existing Cucumber automation code, turning this:

Given('{word} has created an account', function (name) {
    this.createAccount({ name })
})

…into this:

Given('{actor} has created an account',
    actor => actor.attemptsTo(CreateAccount.forThemselves)
)

We’re going to continue this refactoring, looking at how we can compose granular interactions into tasks that model higher-level concepts in our problem domain.

In the previous post in this series, we explored the need for a new kind of pattern for organising our test automation code.

Now we’re going to work with this little codebase to refactor it towards the Screenplay pattern. By taking the existing code and shifting it, step-by-step, towards the pattern, my hope is that you’ll see how you could do this to your own code, should the fancy take you.

In the first post in this series we introduced the concept of the Screenplay pattern and busted a couple of popular myths about it. Now it's time to start digging into some code to give us a real example to demonstrate the pattern on.

The problem with writing this kind of tutorial, always, is finding the right balance between an example that's so complicated it gets in the way of your understanding the thing we're actually trying to learn about, and one that's so simplistic that the need for any kind of software design seems superfluous. If you'll forgive me, we'll err towards the simplistic here, and I'll trust that you've seen enough complex code in the wild to recognise the need for some design work.

Once you've decided to invest in test automation, sooner or later you'll begin to realise that you need to care about the maintainability of that test automation code just as much as you do about the implementation code itself.

For acceptance tests this problem is particularly acute: driving the application from its outside edges involves connecting to APIs, databases, web UIs etc., and this code can quickly get out of hand. Having tried several different approaches myself over the years, I've come to believe that the Screenplay pattern is the best technique we have today.

But it doesn't get the attention it deserves.