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SpecFlow for Rider (Plugin) is now Available!
If you’ve heard about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) in .NET, or are practicing it already, there’s a good chance you’re using SpecFlow. In this post, our friends from SpecFlow dive into how BDD and Rider help you write better, maintainable code through the use of automated tests.
The frequently-requested enhanced SpecFlow IDE support in JetBrains Rider is now available! SpecFlow, JetBrains, and their shared community (spearheaded by Bertrand Provost – big thanks to you, Bertrand!) partnered up to build this IDE Plugin. With the Plugin, SpecFlow users can now enjoy a much smoother experience when embedding automated SpecFlow test cases into their projects.
Ready to get started? It’s free:
What is SpecFlow anyway?
To put it in simple terms, SpecFlow is a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) testing framework that uses the Gherkin syntax, which is similar to Cucumber but optimized explicitly for and focused only on .NET projects. If you are not yet familiar with BDD, SpecFlow will allow you to create more sophisticated, comprehensive, and readable automated (unit) tests for your projects.
You can run them locally or in your CI/CD process just like any other unit test using your favorite unit test runners (xUnit, NUnit, MSTest, or our SpecFlow+ Runner).
Read more about the benefits of SpecFlow or check out this short video:
Check out the plugin here.
What does the plugin do?
The plugin is designed to make working with SpecFlow libraries easier. It provides features for navigating between .feature files and the step binding classes you create to automate them (step bindings and hooks). It also includes things like document formatting, syntax checks, and code generation, just to name a few:
- Syntax Highlighting
- Syntax checks
- File formatting
- Navigation between step bindings and .feature files
- Find all Usages for a step binding
- Create skeleton code for
- Start Scenarios and see the test result within the feature files
Read all about what it can do in our documentation.
Take a look at the plugin in action
Andreas Willich, SpecFlow Community Manager, and Matthias Koch from JetBrains recently gave a demonstration of the plugin and SpecFlow as part of the JetBrains OSS PowerUps Series. Check it out:
The Background Story
We are so excited about the release of this plugin because our incredible community made it so easy for us to identify a meaningful feature. During the ongoing monitoring of our SpecFlow feature requests forum, we noticed something. Our users started asking more and more for a better integrated user experience in Rider.
Once we got a significant number of votes, we started to do some more digging, and we quickly discovered that our community was also very vocal on the JetBrains Rider feature request board, which emphasized that they are heavy users of this awesome IDE from JetBrains.
We immediately reached out to the JetBrains team, who were very enthusiastic about partnering up on their second most voted feature request for Rider. We both made commitments to build the plugin quickly, but destiny provided another happy coincidence for us both. Bertrand, a highly active member of the Rider and SpecFlow community, created the first version of a SpecFlow Rider Plugin while these conversations were taking place and informed the community about it. We both immediately noticed and started a 3-way-partnership with him to create the plugin.
We’d like to give a big shoutout to all of you for showing initiative with your votes and your contributions to our community. Be assured we are monitoring our feature requests very closely, and if you want to work with us, we are just a Discord message away!
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