Test Driven Development with ASP.Net MVC (Part 2)

The series in full:

• Part 1: My take on TDD with MVC
• Part 2: A first view of the Event Booking system
• Part 3: The all important first test
• Part 4: A second test, with a Service call and some mocking
• Part 5: Testing the service layer

In Part 1, I talked about my view on TDD, and the particular flavour I use when doing TDD with MVC. In this post I am going to have a look at the feature we want to implement.

An event booking system

The functionality we are building is for an event booking system.  There is a database full of events, and people can use the web site to search for events and make a booking.

We are interested in implementing the search functionality. We may be fortunate to have analysts, testers and developers working together to craft the user stories with the product owner, but at this stage it doesn’t really matter how the user stories were created.  What matters is that there is a framework of ideas to build from.  They don’t have to be perfect, but it is difficult for the system to emerge without something to kick-start the ideas.

We have the following user story:

As a potential event attendee, I want to search for events, so that I can see all the available events that match my criteria

We also have some screen mock-ups to guide us.  A couple of the more relevant ones are shown below:

Event Search Screen mock-up 1

Event Search Screen mock-up 1

From the mock-ups, what behaviour do we want to cover? There are lots of potential scenarios, but lets focus on a few of the more straight forward ones for now:

• Search criteria options are pre populated
• Search for an event by region
• Search for an event by name
• No results returned from search
• Search criteria is ‘remembered’ when the results are shown

You will see that some of the scenarios overlap. For example, having no search results returned could well be part of searching for an event by name or region, however I find it better to cover the scenarios explicitly for the benefit of test separation in the case of both unit and acceptance testing.

From the scenario list we can now flesh out some examples to use:

Scenario 1 – Search criteria options are pre populated
GIVEN that I want to search for an event by region
WHEN I select to choose a region
THEN a list of possible regions is presented

Scenario 2 – Search for an event by region
GIVEN the following events exist

Event Code	Event Name	Region	Description
CR/0001	Crochet for Beginners	North	A gentle introduction into the art of crochet
CR/0002	Intermediate Crochet	North	Taking your crochet to the next level
CH/3001	Cat Herding	London	A starter session for the uninitiated

WHEN I search for events in the “North” Region
THEN the search results present the following events

Event Code	Event Name	Region	Description
CR/0001	Crochet for Beginners	North	A gentle introduction into the art of crochet
CR/0002	Intermediate Crochet	North	Taking your crochet to the next level

Scenario 3 – Search for an event by Name
GIVEN the following events exist

Event Code	Event Name	Region	Description
CR/0001	Crochet for Beginners	North	A gentle introduction into the art of crochet
CR/0002	Intermediate Crochet	North	Taking your crochet to the next level
CH/3001	Cat Herding	London	A starter session for the uninitiated

WHEN I search for events with the name “Cat Herding”
THEN the search results present the following events

Event Code	Event Name	Region	Description
CH/3001	Cat Herding	London	A starter session for the uninitiated

Scenario 4 – No Search results return from search
GIVEN the following events exist

Event Code	Event Name	Region	Description
CR/0001	Crochet for Beginners	North	A gentle introduction into the art of crochet
CR/0002	Intermediate Crochet	North	Taking your crochet to the next level
CH/3001	Cat Herding	London	A starter session for the uninitiated

WHEN I search for events in the “South” Region
THEN I am informed that no search results have been returned

Scenario 5 – Search criteria is ‘remembered’ when the results are shown
GIVEN I have performed a search in the "North" region
WHEN the search results page is displayed
THEN the search criteria displays my choice of region

In Part 3 we will start implementing the application, guided by the behaviour defined in the scenarios.

The series in full:

• Part 1: My take on TDD with MVC
• Part 2: A first view of the Event Booking system
• Part 3: The all important first test
• Part 4: A second test, with a Service call and some mocking
• Part 5: Testing the service layer