Pickles : Living documentation generator
Recently there came a requirement from the business,they wanted to know a high level view of the specification/requirements of an Project. A colleague suggested that feature files written in gherkin statements where ideal for this purpose.
Therefore we had to look for a tool that would translate the feature files to a more business-friendly format (word,pdf,html), so that the business could have a look at it at their convenience without having to reach out developers.
There were 2 main tools that suited this requirement namely:
Relish is based on Ruby plus it comes with a subscription fee. They do have a Free plan, but all your projects will be public!
Pickles is open-source and easily installed via nuget. The documentation can be found here. Pickles can be run via commandline, GUI,PowerShell or MSBuild
Sample Example using CommandLine
Pickle supports Html, Dhtml,word,JSON and Excel formats.
Install Pickles in your project:
using nuget console manager : Install-Package Pickles.CommandLine
Open Command Prompt in Administrator mode – > Navigate to your Specs project and execute the below command
..\packages\Pickles.CommandLine.2.3.0\tools\pickles.exe --feature-directory=C:\BitBucket\TestProj.Specs --output-directory=c:\my-features-output --documentation-format=dhtml
where --feature-directory = is the path to your test project
--output-directory = path to your output file
--documentation-format = format of the output (optional) . The default output is html
If you want the output in word format then set --documentation-format=word
Plus
The above command can be copied to a .bat-file.
Pickles can also be integrated into automated build or continuous integration tool like TeamCity.
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