What is Cucumber ?
A Simple, human collaboration. As the official website say and that’s true. The other way round it can be simplified as it supports Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) which uses simple English text, defined by a language called Gherkin that allows user to validate functionality.
But then what’s went wrong with cucumber?
Because many of the developer, testers and business people misunderstood it as a testing tool.
- Cucumber was introduced to minimise the ambiguous requirement, misunderstanding happens between the developer, tester, product owners and business analyst.
- It’s a way automated acceptance tests, functional requirements and software documentation into one format that would be understandable by non-technical people as well as testing tools.
How cucumber is treated wrongly?
- When one take it as the testing tool (want to do complete regression test) instead of taking it as acceptance test and functional requirement analyser.
- Want to do complete data driven testing ( using xls, csv and other files), Cucumber doesn’t support the data to be drive from an external file, but it can be tweaked one can use it that way.
How can we use cucumber right?
- Cucumber is a collaboration tool, not the testing tool.
- Cucumber feature should drive the implementation don’t reflect it. ( Cucumber features should be written before the code implementing the feature :D, instead of using the testcase name reflecting it in cucumber)
Good one Siddharth, I agree with u on this and have been spreading this understanding with others.
Very well explained! Cucumber – It was supposed to be a tool to lessen the Gap between Business and technical people, unfortunatelyit has been taken as just another tool for QA to automate.
Nice Write up Sid! Unfortunately, most of us using it as developing complete regression set which takes extra time to write Feature and Step definition files.