rspec users - Oct 2007 - plain text stories: motivation number 27

This is mostly theoretical, but ...

I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and stories
as tickets tagged to a milestone.

Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
account and write apps to process that data.

I think you see where this is going.

It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
RUNNER.

Call me crazy :)

Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.

Thoughts?

On Oct 17, 2007, at 10:41 AM, David Chelimsky wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
>
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
>
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
>
> I think you see where this is going.
>
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
>
> Call me crazy :)
>
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
>
> Thoughts?
> _______________________________________________
> rspec-users mailing list
> rspec-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
wow, and maybe some day, you could press a button to generate a  
screencast of a story...
(almost not kidding...)

On 10/17/07, Jonathan Linowes <jonathan at parkerhill.com>
wrote:
>
> On Oct 17, 2007, at 10:41 AM, David Chelimsky wrote:
>
> > This is mostly theoretical, but ...
> >
> > I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com)
for my
> > projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> > as tickets tagged to a milestone.
> >
> > Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> > account and write apps to process that data.
> >
> > I think you see where this is going.
> >
> > It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> > ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> > RUNNER.
> >
> > Call me crazy :)
> >
> > Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> > important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> > express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> > by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
<snip>
> wow, and maybe some day, you could press a button to generate a
> screencast of a story...
> (almost not kidding...)
Actually you can already do better than a screencast using tools like
watir and selenium which actually run tests against the app in a
browser (so you can see it happening).

On 10/17/07, David Chelimsky <dchelimsky at gmail.com>
wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
>
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
>
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
>
> I think you see where this is going.
>
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
>
> Call me crazy :)
>
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
>
> Thoughts?
> _______________________________________________
> rspec-users mailing list
> rspec-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
>
Definitely.  I sort of hold up the value of plain-text stories as
self-evident, but this example illustrates why they''re so valuable.
Basically, anywhere you could ever want to express requirements
(email, ticket system, wiki, whatever), you can do so, and the result
is executable.  That''s mind-boggling to me.

Pat

On Oct 17, 2007, at 11:26 AM, David Chelimsky wrote:

>
> <snip>
>
>> wow, and maybe some day, you could press a button to generate a
>> screencast of a story...
>> (almost not kidding...)
>
> Actually you can already do better than a screencast using tools like
> watir and selenium which actually run tests against the app in a
> browser (so you can see it happening).
> _______________________________________________
> rspec-users mailing list
> rspec-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
yep, capture that and add an audio narrative...

On 17 Oct 2007, at 15:41, David Chelimsky wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
>
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
>
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
>
> I think you see where this is going.
>
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
>
> Call me crazy :)
>
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
>
> Thoughts?

That''s really cool -- i''d look to do the same with Pivotal
Labs''
Tracker -- export my stories and run them directly. The problem of  
course is acceptance - what happens if someone changes a story in a  
ticket? how do you easily track/manage that?

  -- james

That truly would be the "holy grail".  Before this whole discussion of
plain text stories came up I was playing around with the idea of 
creating an app for story collaboration between developers and 
customers.  So developers and customers alike would login to the system 
and create, modify, and comment (I was think Django Book styling 
commenting) on stories. I think this would facilitate discussions of 
stories between developers and customers who don''t have the luxury of 
always working at the same location.  There are of course many other 
benefits of a system like this for teams that are on site- it would 
create living documenation that would evolve with the project, and 
versioning would provide a window on past iterations.  The other benefit 
would be to have helpers in the app that would explain to customers what 
a story is exactly, and maybe have wizards on creating a story (so a 
step process going though scenarios, and the different clauses  like 
given, when, etc.) 

I was thinking that the app would then generate the skeleton of the 
story file for the developer to work with.  What I was having hard time 
solving was updating the stories based off of  modified stories.  This 
problem was touched on the step matchers thread when someone thought 
that the plain text stories would generates the "real" story testing 
code.  But having the stories being truly plain text based would get rid 
of this problem and allow such a story collaboration app to be created 
and be very straightforward to do. 

For this reason I would love to see something like plain text stories 
happen.  The stories could be pulled from such an app and be ran just 
like your suggesting they could be pulled from lighthouse. 

I guess you can call me crazy too. :)

David Chelimsky wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
>
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
>
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
>
> I think you see where this is going.
>
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
>
> Call me crazy :)
>
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
>
> Thoughts?
> _______________________________________________
> rspec-users mailing list
> rspec-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
>

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 09:41:27AM -0500, David Chelimsky
wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
> 
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
> 
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
> 
> I think you see where this is going.
> 
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
> 
> Call me crazy :)
> 
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
> 
> Thoughts?
I think it will be really useful if you start changing issue status
based on the outcome of the run stories. My main beef with issue
trackers has always been just that, that users click a box to say that
something is done instead of it being handled automatically. 

/Marcus
-- 
Marcus Ahnve
Blog: http://marcus.ahnve.net

What Marcus said ++ ;)

I don''t think it''s a crazy idea, but having workflow both ways
would be so much more useful.

Paddy
 
P?draic Brady

http://blog.astrumfutura.com
http://www.patternsforphp.com
OpenID Europe Foundation


----- Original Message ----
From: Marcus Ahnve <marcus at ahnve.com>
To: rspec-users <rspec-users at rubyforge.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2007 9:45:46 AM
Subject: Re: [rspec-users] plain text stories: motivation number 27


On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 09:41:27AM -0500, David Chelimsky
wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
> 
> I''m starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I''m organizing iterations as milestones and
stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
> 
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in
 your
> account and write apps to process that data.
> 
> I think you see where this is going.
> 
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a
 lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
> 
> Call me crazy :)
> 
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
> 
> Thoughts?
I think it will be really useful if you start changing issue status
based on the outcome of the run stories. My main beef with issue
trackers has always been just that, that users click a box to say that
something is done instead of it being handled automatically. 

/Marcus
-- 
Marcus Ahnve
Blog: http://marcus.ahnve.net
_______________________________________________
rspec-users mailing list
rspec-users at rubyforge.org
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users



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On 10/17/2007 10:41 AM, David Chelimsky wrote:
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
Not crazy at all.  I''ve seen fancy systems (IIRC, RallyDev is one) that
integrate automation testing with bug tracking/feature requests, so that 
a bug doesn''t truly become closed until its tests pass.  Naturally,
that
was only supported if you were using a certain IDE, a certain language, 
a certain test framework, etc.

I think it''d be terrific.

Jay