Dropping Cucumber

Martin Povolny mpovolny at redhat.com
Wed Nov 21 09:40:48 UTC 2012


I don't want to get into any big discussion given I guess many people
share my point of view on this. Just +1 if you agree, please.

>From a programmer point of view cucumber tests are not easy to read. You
have to look into the code to find out what is behind the sentences.
And vice versa: you have to check the patterns to see what they really
do when you write new tests.

It just slows things down and brings no real value. The only people
reading the tests are technical people anyway.

I wondered why we have such small coverage in the cucumber tests that
anytime I wanted to add something to a test so far, I found there was
actually no test. I do not wonder any more if writing UI tests with
cucumber is such a pain.

With a lower level tool, we could be much more productive. I have been
doing web automation using low level tools like PERL WWW::Mechanize and
Ruby Mechanize and have to say, that with such tools, you get really
very productive. Much more productive then when using cucumber.

I suggest using rspec with capybara or directly capybara's DSL. Actually
I really do not care as long as I don't have to keep loosing time
playing with cucumber.

To make it clear I do not suggest rewriting existing tests. But when
writing new ones and doing major refactoring I suggest not using
cucumber.

So please do not start a discussion on what we should use instead of
cucumber, just +1 or -1 for not forcing cucumber.

Thank you!

-- 
Martin Povolny <mpovolny at redhat.com>
tel. +420777714458



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