Cucumber BDD Testing

The primary objective behind the creation of the cucumber framework was to ease the collaborative work between developers and software testers on BBD or behaviour-driven development projects. The driving philosophy behind Cucumber’s development is that all team members must be able to understand the scripting language and logic being used for software and app testing.

Thanks to the Cucumber testing tool it becomes possible to avoid numerous misunderstandings surrounding tests and test results. It does away with a lot of meaningless and elaborate discussions regarding the code created. Cucumber BDD tests help create humanly readable code for the tests which in turn makes collaboration with test code formats easier. It all makes test code easy to maintain and flexible.

Cucumber was developed to make it easier for developers and testers to work together on behavior-driven development projects. It is based on the principle that tests should be written in a language everyone on the team can understand.

According to industry experts Cucumber BDD tests works best if you are trying to verify an app’s most important components focusing on end-user-experience but supports web environment only.

Another popular use of Cucumber is in conducting integration tests that lets developers verify desirable behaviour. It is essential for the business to understand what it is that they are testing which will cut down on uncertainty and make the business feel more confident about the software solution that they are developing.

Unit tests are another sphere where Cucumber testing proves its worth. Common Cucumber unit tests use JUnit or similar tools and frameworks that try to verify the behaviour of the software solution. In this context, awareness about the implementation should be avoided as too tight a combination of the two becomes a great pain during the refactoring exercise which is something developers want to avoid. Remember unit tests are not going to be validated by stakeholders primarily since stakeholders typically don’t have the ability to read test code. And that is why tools like Cucumber exist in the first place.

In a conclusion, Cucumber should be used in all instances where business stakeholders’ opinions matter regarding the behaviour of the software solution to achieve best user experience.

Cucumber is widely acknowledged for its efficacy as a automated testing tool. Besides its automation features, the comprehensive nature of the whole framework with complete BDD support makes it an ideal choice. Some of the more important of using Cucumber BDD are as follows:

Using Gherkin, Cucumber makes it possible for business owners and developers to test features as they interact with it according to the scope of a particular web page or app. It is easy to understand Gherkin enabling non-technical people to understand requirements in terms of clear and brief sentences rather than complex coding syntax. Through Gherkin’s use of plain English to create test scripts enables the different stakeholders in the development of a website or app to understand and review the script without putting in a great effort.

Gherkin makes it possible to track progress of developmental projects and the Gherkin cucumber testing results can reflect their perspectives with greater ease. Some examples of how Gherkin works would be the use of simple to use and understand conditional statements through keywords like “When-Given-Then” and “But-And-Examples-Background” etc

Gherkin format is based on Treetop Grammar which exists in 37+ languages, so you can write your gherkin in 37+ spoken languages.

Once you are done using Gherkin to put forth your business needs in clear, concise language, you can browse through test scenarios and determine the tests that are relevant to the business owner and the business need. Then, it is time to modify and enhance these standard tests. All this makes it easy for business analysts to consider scenarios and transform them into the form of testable requirements. By conducting such tests business owners can determine answers to key business issues that include amongst others:

To put it simply, Cucumber serves as a bridge between the technical product itself and the business needs and serves to reinforce the standing of the intended solution as a suitable solution before it is released live.

The typical testing framework supports only a single programming language. In this, Cucumber stands out through its support for almost all major programming languages that include:

Though originally coded on Ruby, Cucumber presently supports all major programming languages with which developers and testers can create clear and brief tests for a wide variety of differing app implementations. This makes Cucumber super-useful as you can choose a language convenient for you and don’t really need to over-stress on issues like programming tools and platforms.

Cucumber lets teams adopting the Agile methodology to make their development process more effective by automating the testing process and document them suitably. Cucumber excels through its usability for most project stakeholders and facilitate the intuitive creation of test cases. Another aspect of the Cucumber testing tools which makes it highly suitable for the Agile method lies in how lt lets business analysts and project managers adjust and modify test scenarios. It serves to reduce the ambiguity of overall project quality, design, and scope.

Cucumber also supports to use with Jira for project team collaboration with behavior development Gherkin language that acts as documentation and skeleton of your automated tests.

Another great aspect of the cucumber framework is how its lets developers reuse existing code. The operating procedure of cucumber i.e., its use of “When-Given-Then” scenarios when executing test cases helps it achieve this. Not only that Cucumber comes with an eminently usable and understandable UI that makes it more accessible to more non-technical team personnel.