Storyteller 5.0 Discussion

[jeremydmiller]

cc @danjacka @JarrodJ83 @izep @apboyle @JordanZaerr @joemcbride

I'm freeing up after this week and I can probably get away with dedicating a couple weeks to Storyteller, and it definitely needs some love. At a minimum, how is this for a set of planned project improvements?

• Update the client side Javascript components to the latest versions of all (React 14 to 16)
• I'll keep the Rake script for the official CI build and the doc publishing, but introduce shell scripts
  build.cmd & build.sh to build and run tests for folks that don't wanna mess w/ Ruby
• Iron out the socket issues. The fixes for Linux OS's didn't play nice on Windows. Might be time
  for some conditional logic and definitely time for a TravisCI build on Storyteller so we have CI in
  both Windows & Linux at a minimum (I mostly code on OSX, so that'll at least be covered)
• Take another shot at smoothing out the dotnet cli mechanics in dotnet-storyteller. See if we can
  reverse engineer xUnit and see if we can use the build products instead of dotnet-storyteller
  having its own copy of Storyteller. Try to collapse StorytellerRunner into dotnet-storyteller? Lock
  the released version of dotnet-storyteller to the same version of Storyteller to eliminate user
  confusion

In terms of new functionality, my priority list in order would be:

1. dotnet test adapter
2. Tags - folks have asked about it recently
3. Export specifications to a static HTML report where non-developers (or developers) could easily browse specifications\
4. Run the client in "headless" mode - this is quite a bit harder, so I'm not sure if this really gets to happen

I've also started a milestone for this one.

Any thoughts on this one? I wouldn't turn down any help, but I really just wanted some feedback on all of this.

[jeremydmiller]

Forget the dotnet test adapter. The mechanics are absolutely bonkers. I'm going to vote for a much simpler mechanism so you could F5 an individual spec or suite from an ST project

[jeremydmiller]

Now I'm leaning heavily toward doing a full 5.0 release here and making a few breaking changes in the command line and packages:

• Eliminate support for the old AppDomain/StorytellerRunnerCsProj, meaning that only the new VS2017 project format and dotnet CLI would be supported
• Change dotnet-storyteller so that it’s only the editor?
• Make all other commands like just running the specs (dotnet storyteller run today) be part of the actual spec project. Drastically simplifies some of the mechanics by removing the need to use sockets back and forth except when using the editor
• Add more support in the command line arguments to the actual spec project for including or excluding tags, key/value properties and profiles for conditional construction of the ISystem.

[apboyle]

Moving things into the spec project sounds good to me. Will make debugging easier because at the moment we have to work out which dotnet process to attach to (or just attach them all).
We've got no need for anything other than VS2017 and dotnet CLI on our project, so that's sounds ok as well.

[jeremydmiller]

Most of this got done, and I've personally been happy with the changes. Cleaning this up.