Luckily I took a break to eat dinner because when I came back instead of going right back to work I took a few minutes Googling Cucumber and Aruba for some pointers on something unrelated.

And boy am I glad I did.

After reading your article I took one look at my horrible, horrible feature and realized I was doing it all wrong… again.

Thanks for the simple reminder.

Good point Todd. What I hope I’ve made clear is that it’s equally important to refactor your features as it is to refactor your code. Just as much as you want your code to look like you knew about all the requirements all along, you want your features to look like they were just written – you don’t want to see traces of how they got there.

Generally though, it’s about being vigilant and taking a step back and looking at things at a higher level when you start working on a new story.

Despite toying with Cucumber and Cuke4Nuke a few months back I still haven’t got a chance to use it “for real” so don’t have any proper experience to base my judgment on, but what you say makes sense to me.

Indeed, one of the things I had been trying to get in place where I work was an overhaul of how requirements are dealt with/ Traditionally large weight tomes of “the system shall” variety.

Initially we were thinking of exporting the stories we worked on from the tool we use, but the more I thought about it the more I realized this had to be wrong. That would give you something like a series of “transactions” that had led to the system you have…not a coherent description of the system.

I dunno, good question. I guess it would depend how different the behaviour for paying with paypal was to paying with a credit card. If you ended up with a feature with two distinct sets of scenarios – one set for credit cards, and another set for paypal – then I’d probably split the feature in two to keep it clear.

I’d also want to get a feel from my stakeholders as to how they thought about the behaviour – was paypal “just another method of payment” or something quite distinct?

So my answer is: it depends… 🙂

A question though To extrapolate on your example here, users can pay by Paypal. Would you add the feature pay_with_paypal.feature or amalgamate both into an overall payment.feature?

What I’m driving at is, what level of granularity do you prefer your features to be at?