Putting Cucumber where it’s not supposed to go will hurt!

Today, I came across this post by Ryan Bigg where he talks of the pains he’s experienced with Cucumber.

Fortunately for Ryan, the outcome was a positive one, he ended up finding what appears to be a nice looking API for automating test-execution.

The experience he had with Cucumber, however, is a common one. Often teams start using Cucumber in an effort to reduce the need for programming skills when writing automated tests.

This isn’t the problem that Cucumber and other BDD tools are trying to solve and this is why so many teams who misuse it in this way experience difficulty and frustration.

BDD tools like Cucumber are designed to help teams and their customers arrive at a shared understanding of the problem they wish to solve (in terms of the user’s goals and tasks). It’s not really intended to describe the solution (i.e. step-by-step interactions with the GUI).

If your Cucumber scenarios have words such as “click” or “type” or mention field names and the like, it’s probable that you’re either:
a) Using Cucumber to automate test-execution (not what it was intended for) or
b) Trying to do BDD but writing the scenarios at too low a level of detail.

If you’re doing the latter (b)… then you may find the post I wrote over the weekend useful.

If what you’re doing is (a) then the post I wrote over the weekend might help you go down a path where automating your tests will make the transition to BDD that much easier.

If you really, really only want to automate test-execution then you might find that you’re putting Cucumber where it’s not supposed to go… and just so you know – that’s probably going to hurt 🙂