Many people misunderstand the purpose of Cucumber. Because it seems to yield clearer, plain-language test scripts, testers want to use Cucumber as a general-purpose testing tool, including for API tests. But its true purpose is as a BDD framework. You may be thinking, what’s the harm? Here’s why it makes a difference—and why you should choose another tool for API testing.
A little while ago (ok, maybe in the distant past), I started writing about Cucumber. My very first post detailed how to set up Cucumber-JVM, and we’ve come a long way from then. I thought it was worth revisiting, as there are simpler ways to get setup, and better tools out there to use. So […]
I’ve talked before about how important it is to make your BDD glue code as specific as possible, so that anyone reading your Gherkin, knows exactly what that action is supposed to perform. Even my co-workers have noticed this as a problem, and have suggested implementations to help. In a post several years ago, I […]
It’s been a while since I wrote about Cucumber, but hopefully I’m not too rusty. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve recently gotten back into Cucumber. For my current client, I am developing a framework which allows testing the same behavior on multiple applications. To me, this is reminiscent of my first exposure […]
Work with my current client mostly consists of building an automated testing framework, one that utilizes Cucumber, an automated behavioral testing framework, and Gherkin, the language that Cucumber uses to define tests in plain English. The end goal is for the framework to reach a sufficient amount of coverage across the client’s application, so that […]
Introduction It’s been a while since I’ve posted about some BDD work, but I’ve recently gotten back into it using Behave. Over the next few months, I’ll be posting more and more, as I get deeper into the tool, but I figure I’ll start with a comparison based on my initial work. This post will […]
Introduction Last month wrapped up my Cucumber posts for a while. I’ve covered the full gamut of topics for Cucumber, and I don’t believe I have too many more nuggets of knowledge to offer without putting myself out of a job. While working with Cucumber over the past year I’ve done a lot of research. […]
Introduction Part of optimizing your Scenarios within your Features is to ensure you have succinct, reusable test steps. This means making your test steps generic enough to encompass all inputs and variations, but also specific enough to only tie to the implementation you desire. A large part of being successful in this task is to […]
Introduction Before we dive into best practices and tricks in writing our glue code, we want to cover a few last tricks on keeping our Feature files clean. The first of which is how to utilize the Background feature to pull out common test steps. Background Often times when writing multiple scenarios within a singular […]
Tagging Basics Cucumber provides a simple method to organize features and scenarios by user determined classifications. This is implemented using the convention that any space delimited string found in a feature file that is prefaced with the commercial at (@) symbol is considered a tag. Any string may be used as a tag and any […]
