On: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 on...

[benjaminwootton]

I wouldn't be so quick to write off Cucumber et al.

A few benefits:

- Sometimes business users will contribute and use these scripts (admittedly in only some teams and less often than supporters would claim);

- They help with analysis and design as you are forced to question exactly what behaviour you would like to acheive;

- They keep the developer focused on the feature rather than, for instance, building some big fully featured class or library which wont be used;

- They encourage outside in testing so you get good but pragmatic testing for features at each layer of the application;

- They act as a free living documentation on the system;

- They are more lightweight than they initially appear.

I would rather have lots of BDD style tests than the silly tightly coupled unit tests loaded with expectations that you describe erlier in your post.

[zem → benjaminwootton]

the most important bit, i think, is that a cucumber test suite is documentation that cannot go out of date, because if it does your test breaks and you have to fix it, thereby updating the documentation aspect of it.