Then vs. Period–Writing JBehave Stories

Writing stories/scenarios which get automatically executed as in JBehave is sometimes a special art – at least if you want to re-use existing step definitions. Sticking to some rules will help to make your steps re-usable, one is for example to agree on the tense to use in your stories as I mentioned earlier.

I stumbled across another rule when I was writing steps and then implementing them. Here an example:

Implementing the @Then step might look like this:

Referring to the title of this post you might guess the problem: For some yet unknown reason the first scenario marked the @Then step as pending. Solution after hours of debugging (just kidding): The period at the end of the sentence is missing in the step definition!

So you could add an @Alias for this (no, really, you don't want that). Next time you will stumble across parameterized steps where the parameter is at the end of the sentence. Suddenly the parameter will get a period at the end. And suddenly usernames for example don’t match.

The solution is quite simple. I found it in some existing stories of a team:

Don’t use periods!

Really, I hate this approach as from my point of view every new rule will prevent stories to be written. But I think this rule helps so much, that you should stick to it.