The latest version of easyb (that is, 0.9.6) contains two new features (among others, man):

• the ability to run behaviors listed in a file via the -f flag
• capturing any failed behaviors at run time in an output file via the -outfail flag

Thus, given these two features, you can now run a series of behaviors and if any of those behaviors fail, easyb will create a file (the default name if you don’t provide one is failure-files.txt) at the conclusion of the run, which contains a listing of those failed behaviors. Consequently, you can now re-run easyb and pass it this file — accordingly, only the failed behaviors from a previous run will be executed.

For example, imagine you have a suite of behaviors that takes a bit to run — say 10 minutes. If any of those stories (or specifications, for that matter) fail, it becomes somewhat painful to have to re-run the entire suite after making any requisite fixes which address the previously failing behavior. In that case, it oftentimes becomes easier (and much quicker, baby) to just re-run the previously failing bogue behavior (i.e. a few seconds versus 10 minutes). Thus, when executing easyb, say from Ant, you can now set the failureFile property of the easyb like so:

<easyb failureproperty="easyb.fail" failureFile="target/easyb-failures.txt">
....
</easyb>

In this case, I’m running a series of stories and specifications — if anything fails, a new file will be created listing the offending behavior– in my case, the file will be in the target directory and named easyb-failures.txt. The contents of this file are extremely simple — it’s just a listing of fully qualified file paths. Accordingly, if I want to rerun a particular behavior (or behaviors), I can either execute it via the command line via the -f flag like so:

%>java org.easyb.BehaviorRunner -f target/easyb-failures.txt

or via another Ant task like so:

<easyb failureproperty="easyb.fail" inFile="target/easyb-failures.txt">
....
</easyb>

With re-running only a subset of a behavior suite (i.e. just the ones that failed) easyb just got a bit easier, don’t you think, man?