BDD Tests with Xamarin.UITest and SpecFlow

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Writing applications, whether desktop, web, or mobile, is expensive. Developer time is a very limited commodity; one that we have to be careful not to waste. Two very common ways to waste developer time include writing code twice in order to fix what was broken the first time, and writing code that never should have been written in the first place.

Unit testing can help us deal with the issue of not shipping broken code. We should have a full suite of unit tests focused on the method level of our code. These unit tests should be lightning fast, run constantly, and verify that the code we wrote works the way that we expect it to.

Unit tests are invaluable, and I'm a huge fan of them, but they don't necessarily help us avoid writing the wrong code. As developers, every line of code that we write should be driven by an actual business requirement. These requirements are defined by the developers, the product managers, executives, possibly some users, and other important stakeholders working together. This communication between people is extremely important to writing the correct application and features from the start. It doesn't matter how wonderfully our code is executing if it's the wrong code. Typically, these requirements are written down in something like a Microsoft Word document, and passed around between all of the interested parties. The problem with this approach, though, is that it is very, very easy for these documents to be written once, and then become out of date or ignored as the development process begins. What we would really like is for our requirements to written in such a way that they are readable and understandable by all stakeholders, but also have them actually execute against our application in the same way that unit tests are executable. Behavior Driven Development

This is where Behavior-driven development, or "BDD", comes in.

"Behavior-driven development combines the general techniques and principles of TDD with ideas from domain-driven design and object-oriented analysis and design to provide software development and management teams with shared tools and a shared process to collaborate on software development.

Behavior-driven development borrows the concept of the ubiquitous language from domain driven design. A ubiquitous language is a (semi-)formal language that is shared by all members of a software development team — both software developers and non-technical personnel."

Wikipedia

The main purpose of BDD is to facilitate the communication of an application's requirements between the stakeholders. We can write our software specifications in an easily readable and understandable syntax called Gherkin, which can also be used to create executable tests.

For this example, I'm going to use the Xamarin TaskyPro sample application. You can download the source code and run the application yourself, if you'd like. A precompiled binary is included in my sample.

Here you can see an example of defining the user-centric feature to add a new task to the TaskyPro list. Notice that this specification is easily understandable by developers and non-developers alike.

Feature: Adding a task
I want to be able to quickly add a task

Scenario: Add a task
Given I am on the Home screen
When I add a new task called "Get Milk"
And I save the task
Then I should see the "Get Milk" task in the list

Unlike unit tests, these tests generally concentrate on exercising the full running application. In our case, this will mean running an iOS or Android application on a simulator/emulator or on a physical device.

Cucumber and Calabash

When testing mobile apps, there is an existing solution that brings BDD and Gherkin to iOS and Android testing. This is the open source project named Calabash. Calabash uses the Ruby based framework named Cucumber to execute the acceptance tests defined from our specifications. Xamarin.UITest

Xamarin.UITest is a very similar framework to Calabash, except it allows us to write our tests using C# and execute them using one of the common .Net unit testing frameworks, typically NUnit.
Xamarin.UITest gives us t
he means to write tests which interact with and verify the running iOS and Android applications, much like Calabash, but it does so in a much more developer oriented way.

The same test as above, written in Xamarin.UITest, would look like this.

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