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BDD Specs and Parameterizing Phrases

If you plan on using a BDD tool (like Cucumber, SpecFlow, Behat, etc) you are going to want to have some guidelines for how and to what extent you allow parameterized and conditionalized phrases. This is an area that I’ve found can become a rat’s nest of bad habits unless you establish early on how much and to what extent to use these features.

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Specifying Application Workflow Activities

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of specifications and by that I mean test specifications. And by that I mean the specifications you tend to write in tools like Cucumber, SpecFlow, Lettuce and so on. What’s been interesting is deciding at what level of intent to write at.

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Thinking and Testing with Executable Specs – Part 5

This is the fifth post in my series of using a tool that supports writing executable specifications. If this is the first post in the series you’re reading, then you are also reading the last post in the series. Which means this post will be almost totally meaningless to you. To catch up you can read parts one, two, three, and four. (Whether those make this post less meaningless is then up to you!)

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Thinking and Testing with Executable Specs – Part 4

This post is the fourth in my series regarding approaching testing when you are using an executable specification type tool. The first, second and third posts are pretty much necessary reading for this one to make any sense to you at all.

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Thinking and Testing with Executable Specs – Part 3

This post is the third in my series regarding approaching testing when you are using an executable specification type tool. This one will following on directly from the activities done in the first two posts. (I recommend reading part one and part two if you want to follow along, since these really are interconnected threads.)

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Thinking and Testing with Executable Specs – Part 2

This post is the second in my series regarding approaching testing when you are using an executable specification type tool. Assuming you want to follow along, the first post is fairly critical to understanding how the project is currently set up.

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Thinking and Testing with Executable Specs – Part 1

I’ve been doing some presentations and training sessions on using tools like Cucumber. What’s interesting about these is that in many cases people have tried to play around with the tool but have conceptual difficulties with figuring out how to get started in terms of making decisions continuing to using the tool.

As a tester, when introducing yourself to this area of practice, you might read that You’re Cuking It Wrong or that You’re Cuking It Right. It still may not be clear which you are doing. You might read about being imperative versus declarative and wonder which is for you. (Can’t I do both?) You might even come to the conclusion that Cucumber sucks.

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Testing with Cucumber, Capybara and Selenium

In a prior post, I talked about using Capybara and Selenium as just a few among many tools. In a related post on using RSpec and Capybara, I brought up the possibility that “the natural language parts are, in fact, the executable code.” This was in reference to the idea of code logic expressed as natural language in RSpec but that still required actual code that sounded almost like the natural language statements. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to write it twice? You just write it one way and then it executes? The argument then might be to just write the code, and assume the intent of the test can be explained via comments or something else. But many people really wanted to keep the focus on natural language tests.

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