ABAP_to_the_Future

3
ABAP Unit and Test-Driven Development
be managed by both business experts and developers. You will notice that the
naming conventions for test methods used throughout this chapter adhere to the
BDD recommendations that are about to be explained.
When using behavior-driven development, the general recommendation is to
start all the test methods with IT SHOULD, with the IT referring to the application
being tested (the class under test). Thus, you would have names such as IT SHOULD
FIRE A NUCLEAR MISSILE, such names coming straight out of the specification that
describes what the program is supposed to achieve.
In ABAP, you are limited to 30 characters for names of methods, variables, database
tables, and so on—so you have to use abbreviations, which potentially
makes ABAP less readable than languages like Java. In Java, you would have
really long test method names, like It Should Return a BOM For a Purple Monster,
but in ABAP you can’t afford to add the extra characters of IT SHOULD to the
method name. Instead, you can put the IT SHOULD in a comment line with dots
after it, padding the comment line out to 30 characters to make it really obvious
what the maximum permitted length of the names of the test methods are. You
will then declare the test methods unde rneath the dotted line and be aware of
when you are running out of space for the name. An example of this is shown in
Listing 3.29.
*--------------------------------------------------------------*
* Specifications
*--------------------------------------------------------------*
"IT SHOULD.....................
"User Acceptance Tests
return_a_bom_for_a_monster FOR TESTING,
Listing 3.29 Test Methods That Describe What an Application Should Do
Other Names for Behavior-Driven Development
Sometimes, these sorts of behavior-driven development unit tests are described as user
acceptance tests. Although there is no actual user involved, the reason for the terminology
is that this sort of test simulates the program exhibiting a behavior that the user
would expect when he performs a certain action within the program. Outside of SAP,
the testing framework called FitNesse describes itself as such an automated user acceptance
testing framework.
You may also see behavior-driven development referred to as the Assemble/Act/Assert
way of testing (which doesn’t read as much like natural language, but it makes some
people very happy, because every word starts with the same letter).
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