Behaviour driven development with Python

BDD with lettuce and Aloe

Recently I came into contact with Behaviour Driven Developement. As the name already indicates, very similar to Test Driven Development, you start development by defining how you would expect your program to behave in certain conditions. That means the behaviour specification comes first, only then you start to write code to satisfy the behavioural needs.

Naturally this means in the beginning your tests typically always fail, because you don’t have the code yet. This leads to the natural behaviour driven development cycle: Describe the program => Define steps => Run tests => See them fail => Write code => Watch tests pass. Hear is a very nice picture, taken from lettuce’s home page, depicting the situation:

When I started to search about the topic on the internet, the situation was a little bit confusing. From what I understood one of the first frameworks, or at least sort of the reference implementation, for BDD was Cucumber. It is written in Ruby and is very well adopted in the Ruby community.

As is the usual case with Ruby and Python, if one has a nice library, it doesn’t take long until it is ported to the other language. Python’s port of Ruby’s cucumber was called lettuce. The pun is obvious…

But lettuce isn’t Python3 compatible and apparently the maintainers were not willing to take the effort. So a lettuce spin-off was created, named Aloe. Since Python3 is the future of Python, so to speak Aloe is the future of BDD in Python.

When I read about this my thoughts were as follows: “Ok, I want my project to be in Python3, so I have to choose Aloe.” So far so good. I opened Aloe's readthedocs and started with the obligatory Getting started tutorial. But to my surprise the first run gave me this error:

...
ImportError: No module named '_curses'

Well, ok. At this point I should mention I ran this on a Windows machine. (N)curses is known to be home in the Unix universe, so no surprise that there is no curses module. But why do I get this message?! Well it appears the developers of Aloe decided to completely ignore the Windows user world (for now). To my relief is saw that I'm not the only one that realized that.