The monthly dose for BDD addicts… In January #bdd, #specflow and #cucumber stories from Josh Chisholm, The Cucumber team, Angie Jones & Andrew Knight.
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Dear BDD Addicts,
A good start for the new year. It is only January but there have been already posted some interesting news and discussions. I hope this trend will last throughout the entire year. I also have a few exciting things that I am going to announce in the next months. So let’s warm up after the cold days and jump into this month topics. Besides two interesting news, this month I am sharing posts that help writing better Gherkin specifications for our projects. If you see a post or an article that would be a good addition to them, or you have even written one yourself, please let me know at bddaddict@specsolutions.eu. Other topics or topic suggestions are also welcome.
But let’s see our dose finally…
[UI Testing] Cucumber-electron
Today’s modern web applications take the advantages of the modern web browsers. A significant portion of the user interaction logic is running in the browser using javascript and frameworks like Angular or React. This is better for user experience, scalability and for many other reasons, but makes end-to-end testing harder. The more logic is implemented in the browser, the more we are forced to implement the automated tests using browser automation. And browser automation is hard and costly. For this reason, every new idea that can help solving this problem is important. This month a new project, Cucumber-electron has just been announced. Cucumber-electron tries to simplify the automated tests by hosing both the application and the test framework (cucumber-js) in a single Electron process. We still need to learn more about this to see all the benefits, but this is definitely an interesting approach.
Announcing cucumber-electron (Josh Chisholm, @joshski)
Image source: https://cucumber.io/blog/2016/08/31/cucumber-anti-patterns-part-two/
[Process] Even more anti-patterns
The “Cucumber anti-patterns (part one)” was one of those that received the most interest from bdd addicts. Fortunately, we aren’t left without further hints that should be avoided for the sake of a successful BDD implementation. Part two has been also posted! Do you agree? Do you have further “don’t”-s? Write about it! (And send me the link!)
Cucumber anti-patterns (part two) (Cucumber team, @cucumberbdd)
[Gherkin] I, Panda
Given I am a member of a team practicing BDD
When the team member mixes first person and third person phrasing style in the scenarios
Then the result will be confusing and hard to maintain
This scenario summarizes the important problem of inconsistent phrasing style and grammar for Gherkin scenarios. In his blog, the “Automation Panda”, Andy Knight talks about a small, but rather important question. How shall we phrase our scenarios. Shall we use the first person style “Given I …” or rather the third person “When the team member…”? Pandas don’t like talking about themselves…
Should Gherkin Steps Use First-Person or Third-Person? (Andrew Knight, @AutomationPanda)
[Process] Lonely Amigos
There are many posts about the importance of collaboration and communication in BDD. Even the linked Cucumber anti-patterns post mentions this. The post by Angie Jones is different from these. It is focusing on the dark side: The teams which use BDD without the collaboration part. Why do they use it? What benefits can this give to them? How can they get team-level adoption?
BDD Without the Three Amigos: Maybe Talking To Yourself Isn’t So Bad (Angie Jones, @techgirl1908)
[News] SpecFlow Visual Studio 2017 Integration
A new version of the SpecFlow Visual Studio Integration has been released. The package versioned as v2017.1 adds a few fixes and enhancements for VS2015 and introduces SpecFlow support for Visual Studio 2017! Please help the project by rating the package on the Visual Studio Gallery page!
SpecFlow Visual Studio integration v2017.1
[News] New version of Pickles supports JSON output format
There is also a new version from Pickles that can convert your feature files to living documentation in format of dynamic HTML pages, Word or Excel.
Pickles v2.12.0
