Behaviour-driven-design advocate Manish and I have just had a chat over IM. He’s pointed out to me that checking things after the event is just testing, whereas anticipating things before the event is design. Design is good. Bugfixing is a pain.

On the back of that discussion, I’m thinking that JBehave’s Story Runner should probably run a scenario as follows:

Given a context
Then this outcome should occur
When an event happens.

Which ties in nicely with the “should” mechanisms / language of JBehave.

I may, given the JBehave team’s permission (or without it, even, ‘cos it fixes a bug I need fixing) refactor the scenario invoker to perform the above steps, and write a scenario verifier which checks that the anticipated outcome occurs.

I still can’t check that a given method got the arguments after the event. Maybe you should be able to “store” an expected method call on a mock by a key, or some kind of id, so that you can check it afterwards? In fact, I think JBehave’s Minimock already does this… hmm…