Getting to know Cukes

Is Behavior-Driven Development just syntactic sugar for integration testing? That's the question I have been asking more than once recently. There's RSpec, and there's Cucumber - if you are a Ruby developer you'd have heard about those. But why should you do BDD? Because BDD tests cover something Unit Tests don't? That's not the case - in terms of code coverage, BDD doesn't add anything.

(Take a Rails application for example. You can test model integrity with unit tests; application logic with functional tests; and user-app interaction flow with integration tests. That's complete coverage).

Having these doubts about BDD I was eager to sit in on the Cucumber session with Aslak Hellesöy. Things were a bit more involved than I thought. Firstly, it became obvious that Cucumber (or Gharkin, the DSL that powers it) parses human-readable text into strings into which regular expressions can be inserted at runtime.

(Ample amounts of human-readable text is what flashes in the eye when first viewing BDD code. It's easy to think of BDD as something only non-techies can read, but there's more to the picture).

Another interesting detail is that Cucumber follows a well-defined convention for testing. You are Given something, and When you do something else Then something third happens. That's a nice coupling of syntax and semantics. Function follows form. Otherwise it'd be easy to get an impression that nearly everything goes into a Cucumber test spec.

Upon asking Aslak what exactly is Cucumber for: is it mainly for stakeholder - developer communication or is it a superior testing tool aimed at the developer, I received the following answer:

"Cucumber is a stakeholder-team communication tool designed to add more value to the client, however it is also a good developer tool that is capable of providing project documentation at all stages of development: before-coding, during-coding, and after-coding".

A good and exhaustive answer. Now, is Cucumber for you?