CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch2a 2w12 sv

Build Management

Introduction

Build Management is the process of delivering the software in an executable format .The final deliverables are known as software builds . For simple programs one single file is used for compilation but for complex software there will be a main file which in turn will invoke several other files for code compilation.

Consider the following example

A software build may consist of several ‘.c’ and ‘.h’ files. There will be number of make files which will compile the code files. For building the entire software one main Makefile is written which will call other make files for generating the executable. The files are compiled and linked in order by the Build Utility. If there are no code changes in a file then recompilation is not required. Moreover complicated build utilities and linkers do not recompile the code to save time required for the entire build generation.

Build Automation is a component of Build Management and involves automating the activities that developers perform regularly such as compiling source code into binary code and packaging them, running tests and deploying code at the production site and create documentation related to the same.

History and the need for development

Cucumber is actually Aslak Hellesoy's revamp of RSpec's "Story Runner"(by Dan North). The earlier versions of "Story Runner" and its predecessor RBehave required that the stories be written in Ruby. But seeing the associated inconvenience, David Chelimsky added the plain text support with contributions done from an eclectic support team.

In April 2008, Aslak Hellesoy started the Cucumber project to iron out the inherent flaws and glitches of the RSpec Story Runner. Joseph Wilk and Ben Mabey were the regular contributors to the project. Matt Wynne joined in September 2009. In October 2009, Mike Sassak and Gregory Hnatiuk did some great work on a faster parser for Cucumber. In addition to the core team, there were over 250 developers contributing to the overall development of the project.

Though Cucumber is written in Ruby, it can be used to test code written in Ruby and other languages too. Not limited to Java, C# and Python. It required minimal use of Ruby and is hence believed to be extremely easy to code. Moreover, the user stories for the features can be written in any human language.

Ever since, Cucumber has seen a lot of revision and refactoring. One of the major refactoring include transferring certain implementation portions to make it customized for particular frameworks

Build Management Tools

Make

The make command makes use of the Makefile for compiling the code. The Makefile is generally written in Perl or some other scripting language. The wrapper script takes into account the tasks needed for build automation i.e. source code check out, unit tests execution and deployment of the code by placing it in the suitable directory.

A rule in make file specifies how set of instructions should be executed to generate target files from source files.

A simple rule is of the form
 target: dependencies…
         commands…

When executing make the target needs to be specified else it updates the first target mentioned in the Makefile. The intermediate targets are updated before the updation of the final target. The target files should always be up to date. If dependencies are older than the target file, then the target file is already up to date, and it needn’t be generated again.

Ant

Acronym for Another Neat Tool, ant was developed on a Windows Laptop and now owned by Apache. Ant makes use of XML to describe build processes and corresponding dependencies. By default the build file is given the name build.xml. Ant is useful in building Java applications. Ant can also be used for building non-Java application like C and C++. Ant uses Java to specify the types and tasks to be performed which are stored in “antlibs” . Ant is quite flexible and does not enforce the usage of coding convention and directory layouts to the Java projects which use it as a build tool.

Maven

Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool. Derived from the project object model (POM), Maven manages project's build, reports and documentation from a central piece of information.

Maven configuration is effusive, difficult to read and write. Tasks which can be done in one or two lines of Ruby or XML with Rake or Ant require six or seven lines of pom.xml configuration (assuming it’s possible to write it in Maven).

In Maven certain things are configured as classpath references to .properties files bundled in .jar files configured as dependencies, some things are configured as absolute or relative paths to files on disk, and some things are configured as system properties in the JVM running Maven. Sometimes Maven can recursively build projects in the correct order, but sometimes it’s not.

Rake

Rake is the best build tool for Java Projects. The common build tasks in Rake are performed using certain standard methods and can be implemented in Ruby.

How Cucumber works

Cucumber testing comprises of two components namely

• Feature
• Step Definitions

Features

Features are essentially outward facing in the sense that they describe the ideal outcome given a state of the system. A given state of the system is the cumulative input to the system comprising of the events taking place in the given context and the predefined variables. Each feature is a collection of scenarios. The scenarios each are described by the given/when/then + and/but construct. Features are also known as matcher methods and are integral link to the step definitions. Now when Cucumber is executed the corresponding block of Ruby code is invoked. Scenarios are independent of each other and once a scenario execution is over there is nothing which is carried over to the next scenario.

Given/When/Then + And/But construct

Given : Purpose of given is to create a setting for user interaction with the system. These are analogous to the pre-conditions of Usecase.

When: This for the main actions the user performs ‘given’ a scenario i.e. transition of state which has an observable effect.

Then: This is majorly to check the consequences of the action performed by the user i.e. what is the output of the system when a particular input is given.

And/But: These are used when there are multiple given conditions for which some actions need to be performed.

An Example:

  Scenario: Manifold Givens
  Given the username
  And Given the password
  When I press enter
  Then I see the username on the screen
  But I do not see the password on the screen

Step Definitions

Step definitions are primarily inward facing as they map the outward facing scenario statements with the inner Ruby code snippets. Step definitions either consists of keyword, string or regular expression. The mapping is mostly done by expression matching and calling the appropriate code snippets in the Ruby code.

Setting up Capybara

As explained before, Capybara doesn't require explict set up for Rails applications. For Rails, we add the following line to the test helper file:

require 'capybara/rails'

Example of running Cucumber tests on Capybara

After setting up cucumber-rails and Capybara as described above, the following example describes how an actual cucumber test is written and run in the Capybara environment. It is also possible to use the Capybara DSL for writing the tests but the most widely used DSL is Gherkin. The example below uses Gherkin but it can be easily transformed using the DSL provided by Capybara.

Features and Scenarios: As discussed above, the features ... In the example below, the feature describes a scenario within a banking system where a student needs to test the system's ability to find the simple interest on a given principal at a given rate per year.

# Language: English
Feature: InterestCalc
In order to avoid an error in interest calculation
As a new student
I want to be told the interest for given principal per year
 Scenario: Interest on Principal
  * I have entered 1000 into the interest_calc
  * I have entered  3.5 into the interest_calc
  * I press calc
  * The result should 35 on the screen

Step Definitions: As discussed before, the step definitions provided the mapping for the corresponding code snippets that each scenario within the feature interacts with. In this example, for the givens, we first create an object of the class Interest_calc and push the arguments into the instance. Then for when, we call the corresponding method that calculates the interest. For the then, we display the result on the screen.

   require 'capybara/cucumber'
   require 'Interest_calc'
   Given /I have entered (.*) into the interest_calc/ do |n|
     @calci=Interest_calc.new
     @calci.setdata(n)
   end
   When /I press (\w+)/ do |op|
     @result=@calci.calc
   end
   Then /the result should be (.*) on the screen/ do |result|
     @result.should == result.to_f
   end

Class definition: This is the Interest_calc class that is accessed in the step definition.

  class Interest_calc
    def push(n)
      @args ||= []
      @args<<n
    end
    def calc
      @args.inject(0){|p,r| p=p*r/100}
    end
  end

Advantages

The advantages of Cucumber are that it mandates a person to spend more time in the planning phase before directly getting into the complexities of models, views and controllers. It lets one have a broader perspective of the application one intends to develop. The syntax which is in simple English is what makes it unique letting clients who are not aware of the technicalities of a system, voice their opinion in the development process and hence the development is always in sync with the requirement.

Ongoing developments

Cucumber has rapidly become one of the most preferred tools for automated testing. Aslak Hellesoy and his team are working on further advancements and improvements to the tool. Improving the documentation via the "The Cucumber Book" being one of them. The book continues to be revised to keep up with its rapid evolution. Currently, Cucumber tests run on JVMs through JRuby. But to overcome the inherent latency, the team is working on a native Java implementation of the tool which can be built in to the Java development environment. During this adaptation to Java, the team also found aspects of the Ruby implementation that could be improved to make it much more flexible.

References

• http://cukes.info/
• http://www.rubyinside.com/cucumber-the-latest-in-ruby-testing-1342.html
• http://www.allenwei.cn/cucumber-capybara-what-we-need-for-rails-integration-test/
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/155-beginning-with-cucumber
• http://rubysource.com/smelly-cucumbers/

Further reading

• http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/11/27/the-truth-about-bdd
• http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog/2008/05/intro-to-story-runner-and-bdd.html