BDD Style Naming Macro for Visual Studio

Posted by mattcalla at 15 January 2008, 4:24 PM
Categories: Agile,.NET,BDD



I've really jumped on board with BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) in the past week.  I've been reading about it for awhile, but it wasn't until I started actually doing it on a side project of my own that I've really begun to realise how good it can be.  The natural language naming style of the 'specs' (not 'tests' anymore) in different 'contexts' is an excellent way to express through code what your systems does (or should do).

If you have no idea what I'm blabbering on about, you should probably do a google search on 'BDD' or check out the links below:

Writing software BDD style really changes the way you think about how you express what your system does through your tests/specs.  Writing specs in different 'Contexts' have enabled me to make my tests more precise and to the point.  It is definitely something that I will strive to start using for real projects in the coming few months.

Anyway, so now that you know what BDD is, I can get to the original reason I started this post: a handy BDD naming macro that speeds up your development time by formatting your naturally written sentences into a properly constructed test case shell. 

eg.  You type:

should be able to load all items

<macro executed via keyboard shortcut> and you get:

[Test]
public void Should_be_able_to_load_all_items()
{
}

Having something like this just makes writing your specs a whole lot simpler.

Now I just want to point out, I didn't come up with the idea for this macro.  It was developed originally by Scott Bellware and then evolved by Terry Hughes.  This is outlined in a blog article here.

The code for the macro shown on the link above just replaces the spaces with underscores.  I've evolved it further to also:
  • Append '()' to the end of the line
  • Prepend '[Test]' to the line above (because I'm still using NUnit as my testing/spec framework)
  • Capitalise the first letter of the spec name
  • Provide an empty method body enclosed by '{' and '}'.
As a result of the above additions, I've also changed the name of the method to 'FormatTestCaseBDDStyle()'.  This name better reflects what the method does.

Code is below:


Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module CodeEditor

    Sub FormatTestCaseBDDStyle()

        If DTE.ActiveDocument Is Nothing Then Return

        Dim selection As TextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection(), EnvDTE.TextSelection)
        selection.SelectLine()

        If selection.Text.Trim() = "" Then Return

        Dim prefix As String = "public void "
        Dim index As Integer = selection.Text.IndexOf(prefix)

        Dim description As String = selection.Text.Replace(prefix, String.Empty).Trim() + "()"
        description = description.Replace(" ", "_").Replace("'", "_")
        description = description(0).ToString().ToUpper() + description.Substring(1)

        selection.Text = ControlChars.Tab + _
                        ControlChars.Tab + _
                        "[Test]" + _
                        ControlChars.NewLine + _
                        ControlChars.Tab + _
                        prefix + description + _
                        ControlChars.NewLine + _
                        "{" + _
                        ControlChars.NewLine + _
                        ControlChars.Tab + _
                        "}"

        selection.EndOfLine()
        selection.LineUp()

    End Sub
End Module



So basically when you sit down to write your next spec, you just write the sentence as you would if you were speaking to a human, invoke the macro keyboard shortcut, and it does the rest for you.

For help on getting the macro setup in Visual Studio check out the following links:

Just as a side note, the project I've started using BDD on (and NHibernate too for that matter) is going to be basically a CMS for another website of mine that I'm slowly building up: www.pineappletinfeet.com.  I will be releasing the source code of this project in the future so you can see my journey with BDD.

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