Storyteller 3.0 Official Release — and on to 4.0

I was able to finally cut an official Storyteller 3.0 release to Nuget at the end of last week with a few fixes. Storyteller is a tool for writing and running executable specifications (BDD, if you absolutely have to call it that), end to end automated testing, and a separate function for generating technical documentation websites that I’ve used for StructureMap, Marten, and Storyteller itself.

Some links with a whole lot more information:

• The Storyteller documentation website
• Executable Specifications in Storyteller 3 (Jetbrains webinar)
• My blog post announcing the 3.0 version work from last year

• Succeeding with Automated Integration Tests

• Other blog posts I’ve written about Storyteller

I’ve done two conference talks about Storyteller in the last year but both of the videos were never posted. I’ve had rotten luck with this lately:( I *might* be doing a talk about the building of the Storyteller client with React.js at CodeMash.

Onward to 4.0!

With Marten settling down after its 1.0 release, I’ve been able to devote much more time to Storyteller and the 4.0 release is well underway. While there are worlds of little GitHub issues to knock down, the big themes for 4.0 are to:

1. Get Storyteller running cross platform using the CoreCLR. I blogged about my plans for pulling this off a couple weeks ago, and as of last week I’m able to run Storyteller locally on Mac OSX. I’ll be writing a follow up experience report post soon, but the summary is “so, that sucked.”
2. Fully embrace the dotnet CLI and create a dotnet test adapter for Storyteller to make it far easier for developers to run and debug Storyteller specifications
3. The “step through” model of executing specifications when troubleshooting failing specs. This is partially done now, but there’s plenty to do on the UI client side before it’s really usable.
4. Extend the reach of Storyteller by allowing users to author the specification language on the fly in the specification editor without having to first write C# code. My hope is that this feature will make Storyteller much more effective as a specifications tool. This had been a goal of the 3.0 release, but I never got to do it.
5. Enhance the performance testing and diagnostic support in Storyteller today. Maybe the most popular feature of Storyteller is how it captures, correlates, and displays information about the system performance during spec execution. I’d like to take this farther with possible support for gathering benchmark data and allowing teams to express non-functional requirements about performance that would cause specifications to fail if they’re too slow.
6. Potentially, be able to use the existing Storyteller specification editor and runner against completely different testing engines written for other languages or platforms

More coming this fall…