pea - The tiniest green vegetable.

pea is a minimal BDD framework for python, in the style of ruby’s cucumber and python’s lettuce. It aims to help you write the same kind of tests - but in straight-up python code, without all the parsing and indirection and other hoops to jump through. It’s a lot like ruby’s coulda.

Benefits of cucumber-style testing include:

• You write your tests in clear, english language without inline code

• Your tests are human-readable, and hopefully human-editable

• You can re-use steps with confidence, because they all do exactly what they say on the tin

Benefits of pea over lettuce, cucumber, etc:

• It’s a really trivial library (thus the name). It doesn’t do very much, so it probably doesn’t have many bugs

• Your features are just python code:

  • No “BDD language parser” needed

  • No regular expressions

  • Stack traces make sense

  • Syntax highlighting

  • You can use ctags to jump between test & implementation, as well as for method completion

  • Managing and renaming functions is much easier than managing regexes

  • You can use whatever abstractions you like

  • You can use rich python objects as arguments, instead of parsing strings

• It doesn’t need its own test runner; so you can just use nose to run it alongside your unit tests

So how do I use it?

Here’s a minimal example:

from pea import *

@step
def I_go_to_the_store():
        world.location='store'
        world.cart = []

@step
def I_buy_some(item):
        world.cart.append(item)

@step
def I_go_home():
        world.location = 'home'

@step
def I_have_some_delicious(item):
        assert item in world.cart
        world.assertEquals(world.location, 'home')

# --------------------

class TestShopping(TestCase):
        def test_buying_some_peas(self):

                Given.I_go_to_the_store()
                When.I_buy_some('peas')
                And.I_go_home()
                Then.I_have_some_delicious('peas')

… and when you run it (with nosetests, in verbose mode):

Typically you would put your steps in a separate python module (or many), but it’s your choice.