BDD Requirements Management with JBehave, Thucydides and JIRA

Thucydides lets you associate JBehave stories or JUnit tests with a JIRA card using the @issue meta tag (illustrated above), or the equivalent @Issue annotation in JUnit. At the most basic level, this will generate links back to the corresponding JIRA cards in your test reports, as illustrated here:

For this to work, Thucydides needs to know where your JIRA server. The simplest way to do this is to define the following properties in a file called thucydides.properties in your project root directory:

You can also set these properties up in your Maven pom.xml file or pass them in as system properties.

Thucydides also supports two-way integration with JIRA. You can also get Thucydides to update the JIRA issue with a comment pointing to the corresponding test result.

But test results only report part of the picture. If you are using JIRA to store your stories and epics, you can use these to keep track of progress. But how do you know what automated acceptance tests have been implemented for your stories and epics, and, equally importantly, how do you know which stories or epics have no automated acceptance tests? In agile terms, a story cannot be declared "done" until the automated acceptance tests pass. Furthermore, we need to be confident not only that the tests exist, but they test the right requirements, and that they test them sufficiently well.

We call this idea of measuring the number (and quality) of the acceptance tests for each of the features we want to build "feature coverage". Thucydides can provide feature coverage reporting in addition to the more conventional test results. If you are using JIRA, you will need to add thucydides-jira-requirements-provider to the dependencies section of your pom.xml file:

(The actual version number might be different for you - always take a look at Maven Central to know what the latest version is).

You will also need to add this dependency to the Thucydides reporting plugin configuration:

        <build>
            ...
            <plugins>
                ...
                <plugin>
                    <groupId>net.thucydides.maven.plugins</groupId>
                    <artifactId>maven-thucydides-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>0.9.257</version>
                    <executions>
                        <execution>
                            <id>thucydides-reports</id>
                            <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
                            <goals>
                                <goal>aggregate</goal>
                            </goals>
                        </execution>
                    </executions>
                    <dependencies>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>net.thucydides.plugins.jira</groupId>
                            <artifactId>thucydides-jira-requirements-provider</artifactId>
                            <version>0.9.260</version>
                        </dependency>
                    </dependencies>
                </plugin>
            </plugins>
        </build>

Conclusion