Taking queues from Adam Wiggin’s first commit to his Rush project, simply a design document and some specs, and Err the Blog’s post about BDD and generating specs from YAML, I’ve written a small Rake task that will take a single file design document in YAML and separate it out into the components you specify. For example:

spec/design.yml

Website Integration:
    - should be able to log in from the front page and land at your profile
 
OpenID module:
    - should accept an OpenID URL
    - should return an error message if the URL cannot be reached
 
User:
    - should have a valid user name
    - should return an error if creating a duplicate user name is attempted

And then:

rake design

Takes the section headers, and flattens them as the filenames. So this particular design creates three different files, website_integration_spec.rb, openid_module_spec.rb, and user_spec.rb. They’ll look like this:

spec/user_spec.rb

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/spec_helper'
 
describe 'User' do
 
  it 'should have a valid user name'
  it 'should return an error if creating a duplicate user name is attempted'
 
end

And just like that, you have your specs, ready to go!

Here it is:

Please note that it will destroy those files if they already exist, replacing them! I really don’t care if you lose your existing specs! Back them up if you want to try this! You have been warned! This is more of a technique for a brand new project, anyway.

Also, please note that I’ve embedded the rake task as a GitHub Gist paste, so feel free to fork it and modify it. I’d be interested in seeing cleaner, more interesting implementations of my 30-second hack. Additionally, please choose view raw if you want to copy it, seeing as how GitHub seems to bork on a newline character in the code snippet.