> I will never understand the reason for Cucumber to exist
In a previous company I had one use-case that I thought cucumber helped out a lot at.
We were writing software that would be vigourously tested and approved by a customer who didn't have any technical knowledge. Their initial plan was the "Excel sheet of death" test case management system with really fuzzily named tests.
I convinced them to write Cucumber tests, which turned out to be around 100, using the very explit syntax that then got called stupid by the cucumber devs and moved to the "training-wheels" gem. I never expressed what we were doing as cucumber tests. I just told them "Write them like this and it is easy to understand" and they agreed and did so, then they were signed off by our project team and them.
After that I then automated them our side so that we could run them quickly and easily in our pipeline while the customer could still use the tests for their tedious manual user acceptance testing at the end.
It worked out quite well. The customer never knew we automated the tests our side, they were just thrilled that something like 99% tests passed first-time and the 1% that didn't were down to interpretation differences.
Congratulations! I think this is actually the first time I've seen a use for Cucumber. Obviously, it would have been better if you didn't have to do this but I've spent enough time as a consultant to know when to just work around the customers.
In a previous company I had one use-case that I thought cucumber helped out a lot at.
We were writing software that would be vigourously tested and approved by a customer who didn't have any technical knowledge. Their initial plan was the "Excel sheet of death" test case management system with really fuzzily named tests.
I convinced them to write Cucumber tests, which turned out to be around 100, using the very explit syntax that then got called stupid by the cucumber devs and moved to the "training-wheels" gem. I never expressed what we were doing as cucumber tests. I just told them "Write them like this and it is easy to understand" and they agreed and did so, then they were signed off by our project team and them.
After that I then automated them our side so that we could run them quickly and easily in our pipeline while the customer could still use the tests for their tedious manual user acceptance testing at the end.
It worked out quite well. The customer never knew we automated the tests our side, they were just thrilled that something like 99% tests passed first-time and the 1% that didn't were down to interpretation differences.