You create a Behaviour Class, which is a plain Java class that by convention has the name of the class whose behaviour we are specifying followed by the word “Behaviour”, so Cheese has CheeseBehaviour.

Inside the Behaviour Class are a bunch of methods that specify the behaviour we expect. These are just public void methods that start with the word “should” and describe the specific behaviour (e.g. CustomerServiceBehaviour might have shouldFindCustomerBySurname()).

These will typically set up a known environment, execute some behaviour and then verify that stuff happened. There are some static methods in org.jbehave.core.Ensure that help with this, for instance Ensure.that(somethingHappened) and Ensure.that(actualValue, eq(expectedValue)).

Our template behaviour method looks like this:

Behaviour classes can be contained in a behaviour class container (!). This is a plain Java class that implements the org.jbehave.core.behaviour.Behaviours interface. This has a single method: getBehaviours(), which returns an array of Classes representing the behaviour classes to run. Naturally behaviour class containers can contain other behaviour class containers.

Behaviour is verified by reflecting into the behaviour classes and invoking the methods. A Listener is notified whenever something interesting happens.

A single behaviour method is represented as a BehaviourMethod and verified by a MethodVerifier, a behaviour class is verified by a BehaviourClassVerifier

So how do we tie this all together? There is a small main method inside org.jbehave.core.Run that takes a behaviour class name as its argument and invokes a BehaviourVerifier on it passing in a TextListener. Run that with jbehave.jar on your classpath. And, um, that’s it. So: