[rspec-users] plain text stories: motivation number 27

[Ben Mabey]

That truly would be the "holy grail".  Before this whole discussion of 
plain text stories came up I was playing around with the idea of 
creating an app for story collaboration between developers and 
customers.  So developers and customers alike would login to the system 
and create, modify, and comment (I was think Django Book styling 
commenting) on stories. I think this would facilitate discussions of 
stories between developers and customers who don't have the luxury of 
always working at the same location.  There are of course many other 
benefits of a system like this for teams that are on site- it would 
create living documenation that would evolve with the project, and 
versioning would provide a window on past iterations.  The other benefit 
would be to have helpers in the app that would explain to customers what 
a story is exactly, and maybe have wizards on creating a story (so a 
step process going though scenarios, and the different clauses  like 
given, when, etc.) 

I was thinking that the app would then generate the skeleton of the 
story file for the developer to work with.  What I was having hard time 
solving was updating the stories based off of  modified stories.  This 
problem was touched on the step matchers thread when someone thought 
that the plain text stories would generates the "real" story testing 
code.  But having the stories being truly plain text based would get rid 
of this problem and allow such a story collaboration app to be created 
and be very straightforward to do. 

For this reason I would love to see something like plain text stories 
happen.  The stories could be pulled from such an app and be ran just 
like your suggesting they could be pulled from lighthouse. 

I guess you can call me crazy too. :)

David Chelimsky wrote:
> This is mostly theoretical, but ...
>
> I'm starting to use lighthouse (http://llighthouseapp.com) for my
> projects at work. I'm organizing iterations as milestones and stories
> as tickets tagged to a milestone.
>
> Lighthouse offers an API so that you can write access the data in your
> account and write apps to process that data.
>
> I think you see where this is going.
>
> It seems to me that a plain text story could be stored in a lighthouse
> ticket, read in via the lighthouse API ... AND EXECUTED BY STORY
> RUNNER.
>
> Call me crazy :)
>
> Sure, this is theoretical in terms of lighthouse - but it reveals an
> important benefit of plain text stories: it would be possible to
> express stories in any of a variety of systems and have them consumed
> by an adapter that feeds them in to story runner.
>
> Thoughts?
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