Behavior Driven Design

Every now and then I get the urge to try out some of the more recent design methods coming out lately - usually they tend to end in 'DD.' Rob Conery is largely responsible for this trend in me to experiment, as his screencast series on MVC Storefront (now Kona) demo these different ideas rather well.

His most recent screencast introduced Behavior Driven Design (BDD) to me, and I have to say that of all the 'DD's, BDD makes the most sense to me. So I've decided to try and build an entire project using it (one that I've been putting off far too long).

The guild to which I belong (which I will not name here) requires a website, and rather than use something like GuildPortal for it, I've decided to build it myself, using ASP.NET MVC. All of the various systems will be custom built by me - I don't want to use any community management software, etc., because I want this to be a learning experience for me.

Among the components I'll be building, the simplest is the News Service, which will let administrators post guild news. I've decided to spec out this service before I build it. Here's my list of specs:

• when viewing article titles
  • should display a date descending ordered list of article titles
• when viewing top n articles
  • should display up to n articles in a date descending ordered list
• when creating a new article
  • should contain the authors id
  • should contain the posted date
  • should contain the article title
  • should contain the article body
• when viewing a single article
  • should display the articles contents
• when adding a new news article
  • should provide a new id for the news article
  • should add the item to the news service
• when removing a news article
  • should remove the item from the news service
• when editing a news article
  • should update the item to the new contents

This describes a basic news service, I think, as a user or administrator might understand it (which is one of the goals of BDD btw - the terminology you use should be part of the business language rather than the technical language).

Now for some disclosure - I must admit I've cheated a bit here for the purposes of this blog post. The above list comes from the MSpec runner report output. MSpec is a BDD specification framework which lets you define your specifications in terms of executable code, which you can use to verify that your specifications are met. I did write my specs first - MSpec allows you to leave your specifications unimplemented - but I have already written the required functionality against a mock news article repository.

So far - fun stuff. I'm still a little apprehensive - I have no real idea what I'm doing, but I'm sure I'll figure it out as I make false steps here and there. This is a toy project really (but unlike other toy projects this one will be actually useful, so I'll be less inclined to give up on it, especially with my guild leader nagging me incessantly...) - but I want to give it all I can.