Pankaj Nakhat's blog : All About Agile Testing

If you are using Jbehave and wonder how to execute your scenarios with different set of data without repeating the steps, so that your scenarios don’t blow up repeating same steps with different set of data.

You can also refer to this scenario as data driven testing, as each of the row in your data table becomes one test case.

In the example below lets say I am testing a calculator sum function, and for that I need to have several test cases to test with different data. So basically steps looks like this, however we need to give different input and assert output.

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Scenario: As as user I want to test calculator sum function 
Meta:
@author pankaj
 
Given calculator takes <input1> and <input2>
Then the sum is <sum>
 
Examples:
|input1|input2|sum|
|2|3|5|
|4|5|9|
|10|12|22|

And steps implementation for the above written steps will need to use Named parameter. So basically Named parameter (Which is usually in <>), will be replaced by the data in the table below the steps in the story. In the above example there are three named parameter in my story.

In the steps implementation, you step needs to explicitly use the named parameter in the method. Using named parameter in the steps tells jbehave that it needs to replace this with the data in the table specified below/or in another file.

Steps class would look like

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package org.qainfolabs.jbehave.steps;
 
import java.math.BigDecimal;
 
import junit.framework.Assert;
 
import org.jbehave.core.annotations.Given;
import org.jbehave.core.annotations.Named;
import org.jbehave.core.annotations.Then;
import org.qainfolabs.app.Calculator;
 
public class CalulatorSteps {
 
	private BigDecimal input1;
	private BigDecimal input2;
 
	@Given("calculator takes <input1> and <input2>")
	public void readFruits(@Named("input1") BigDecimal input1,
			@Named("input2") BigDecimal input2) {
		this.input1 = input1;
		this.input2 = input2;
	}
 
	@Then("the sum is <sum>")
	public void doSum(@Named("sum") BigDecimal sum) {
		Calculator calc = new Calculator();
		Assert.assertEquals(sum, calc.sum(input1, input2));
	}
}

After the scenario is executed Jbehave will produce a detailed report of the scenario, showing the steps repeating with replaced parameter with each data set.