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Writing Stupid Specifications with Concordion

For a while I've been an avid lover of the concordion testing framework, but one thing I always struggled with was the separation of state/data between the specification and the fixture. As a simple work around I added a simple "eval" command, which simply takes an elements content and turns it into a camel cased method name to call on the fixture.

When using a specification marked up as:

a specification with the following methods is exercised:

The result is a very lightweight specification that contains no state, data, or scripting in it, and by sticking to a single command, I open myself up to driving concordion from a simple wiki syntax without having to worry about how to encode all the various commands.

The eval command itself is fairly simple:

I have some ideas to improve further on this (stealing from Cucumber) to extract any numbers, or strings in quotes as parameters to the evaluated method which should add even more value to these extremely simple specifications, along with a similar "echoeval" command to insert content from the fixture into the rendered specification.

I'm sure a lot of people might cringe at this way of writing tests and specifications, but I'm finding I can very quickly jot down a sentence or two about something I want to test as it occurs to me in the form of a specification (rather than a TODO comment or JIRA task) and immediately have it fire up as a failing test.

Recent Album Reviews

I've been meaning to write up some album reviews for the ever growing mass of recently acquired music this year, and late last year but I always find writing reviews hard - hard to give enough justice to the music, hard to fully articulate any thoughts or feelings that came up whilst listening. As we've been using Mind Meister for the Illegal Argument podcast, I thought I'd do the same to map out the music and thoughts:

What started as a fairly simple mind map quickly grew into a entwined mess of genre mixing music centering around a melodic, yet frenetic mishmash of technical, progressive, and extreme styles. From artists like Belarus based Thelema, whose progressive/technical death metal fuzes elements of jazz then sliding over to the advant garde jazz entwined mathcore of Berlin based War From A Harlot's Mouth. The discovery of Prog Archives via Twitter led to a financial downfall and music journey of discovery with such delightful findings such as Brazilian based Dialeto, Norways Gazpacho, Puerto Rico's Trili.

Standout "big name" albums of recent adoration include the new Ty Tabor (Kings X) solo album "Balance", Tim "The Ripper" Owen's new solo album "Play My Game", Heaven and Hells (damnit, it's Sabbath ok?) "The Devil You Know".

Out of everything I've been listening to lately, I've not found any duds, however the new Chariot release "Wars and Rumours of Wars" and Leif Edling's solo album "Songs of Torment, Songs of Joy" were definite letdowns.