Skip to main content

Pickles–Generate documentation from your SpecFlow tests

I’m a big fan of SpecFlow, a BDD framework that allows you to write your tests as executable specifications. A colleague mentioned another tool, Pickles, that generates documentation in a variety of formats from your specifications. Time to give it a try…

Installing Pickles

The easiest way to integrate Pickles in your project is to download it through NuGet. So let’s do that first:

Install-Package Pickles

This will download the Pickles Powershell DLL and load it in the Package Manager shell.

image

Running Pickles from Powershell

Let’s write some Powershell code to test Pickles. First initialize some variables to simplify the readability:

And now invoke the Pickle-Features command:

You should see similar results like below:

image

Let’s have a look at the generated results. You get a nice website which shows you all the features and their test results:

image

image

Specflow also supports other formats then HTML. Here is the full list:

  • HTML
  • DHTML (javascript-enabled, search capabilities)
  • JSON
  • Word
  • Excel

More information

For more information, have a look at the following links:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...

The role of ActivitySource in OpenTelemetry for .NET

While doing some pair programming to integrate OpenTelemetry tracing to a .NET application, we had a discussion on how to use the ActivitySource . It looks simple. You new one up, give it a name, start an activity, done. The discussion started when we added a second ActivitySource with the exact same name in a different class. This made us wonder: "Are we duplicating traces now? Is this a memory leak? Do we need a singleton?" So we decided to dig deeper. This post is what we learned… What ActivitySource actually is ActivitySource is part of System.Diagnostics , not part of the OpenTelemetry NuGet packages. Microsoft built tracing primitives directly into the BCL, and OpenTelemetry's .NET SDK simply listens to them. This is why you can add distributed tracing to a library without taking a dependency on OpenTelemetry at all. An ActivitySource is a factory for Activity objects, and an Activity is .NET's name for what OpenTelemetry calls a span.(don’t ask m...