Inventory Before Moving On

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First up tonight, I follow the advice of an astute reader and probe a date boundary in a little more depth. In my browse-meals-by-month Cucumber scenario, I had only probed navigation between months, but failed to perform similar navigation across a year boundary.

To address this, I add a meal from 2003 to the scenario (in bold):

  Scenario: Browsing a meal in a given month

    Given a "Even Fried, They Won't Eat It" meal enjoyed in May 2009
    And a "Salad. Mmmm." meal enjoyed in April 2009
    And a "Almost French Onion Soup" meal enjoyed in September 2003
    When I view the list of meals prepared in May of 2009
    Then I should see the "Even Fried, They Won't Eat It" meal among the meals of this month
    And I should not see the "Salad. Mmmm." meal among the meals of this month
    And I should not see a link to June 2009
    When I follow the link to the list of meals in April 2009
    Then I should not see the "Even Fried, They Won't Eat It" meal among the meals of this month
    And I should see the "Salad. Mmmm." meal among the meals of this month
    And I should see a link to May 2009
    And I should not see a link to February 2009
    When I follow the link to the list of meals in September 2003
    Then I should see the "Almost French Onion Soup" meal among the meals of this month
    And I should see a link to April 2009

Running the scenario now, everything is passing:



Nice! I didn't need to add any code, but now have assurance that it will work, even across year boundaries.

With that, I am considering that scenario complete.
(commit)

Before moving onto the next scenario, I run all of the Cucumber scenarios to ensure that I haven't accidentally broken something and to see where I'm at. Where I am at is:



135 passed steps and only 4 step undefined am I really that close to being done? Sadly no.

I need to do a quick inventory of what is left before I am done:

• The home page


• CSS—everything is unstyled at this point


• Deploy CouchDB design documents


• Advanced search interface


• RSS Feeds


• Mailing lists


• Feedback forms


• Cookbook collection—a list of the cookbooks (linked to via our Amazon associates account) from which various recipes draw inspiration

Since I am replacing an existing site, I probably cannot get away with omitting many of those. I ought to be able to deploy without the advanced search form, the cookbook collection, and the mailing lists, at least initially. But I will definitely need a home page and CSS. I probably should not orphan the RSS feed either.

That means more Cucumber scenarios. First up, RSS feeds...

I like to anthropomorphize all non-human actors. It helps me to conceptualize what really needs to be done. Nothing too fancy in the case of RSS consumers:

 Feature: RSS

  So that I tell my user when there are updates to this great cooking site
  As an RSS bot
  I want to be able to consume your RSS

  Scenario: Meal RSS

    Given 20 yummy meals
    When I access the meal RSS feed
    Then I should see the 10 most recent meals
    And I should see the summary of each meal

  Scenario: Recipe RSS

    Given 20 delicious, easy to prepare recipes
    When I access the recipe RSS feed
    Then I should see the 10 most recent recipes
    And I should see the summary of each recipe

Additionally, I add a general site-wide feature description with 5 scenarios (individual step text not included for brevity's sake):

Feature: Site

  So that I may explore many wonderful recipes and see the meals in which they were served
  As someone interested in cooking
  I want to be able to easily explore this awesome site

  Scenario: Quickly scanning meals and recipes accessible from the home page

  Scenario: Exploring food categories (e.g. Italian) from the homepage

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors of this fantastic site

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors on a yummy meal

  Scenario: Give feedback to the authors on a delicious recipe

(commit)

With that, I am up to 54 undefined Cucumber steps. That's somewhat deflating, but should serve as a fairly realistic estimate of the outstanding work remaining before I can deploy.

And I'll get started with the first of those 54 steps tomorrow.