A BDD Tool for Your Agile Testing Tool Belt

The testing world is changing. As more and more companies push to deliver software in smaller increments at a faster pace, gone are the days of heavy manual testing that can take weeks to complete.

Recognizing this, successful Agile Testing shops have adopted approaches, such as Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), that adhere to the principle of faster feedback and smaller increments.

Unfortunately, even BDD fails without the right tools being used in the right way, and one such “right” tool is the Cucumber automation framework.

The Cucumber Automation Tool

Cucumber was born out of Dan North’s BDD movement. At first, a handful of tools were created to add automation to BDD – and most failed until Aslak Helesoy’s Cucumber automation framework. What separates Cucumber from other BDD tools is that not only is it a great automation tool, but it’s a great collaboration tool, as well.

By writing all scripts in the Gherkin (Given-When-Then) format, Agile Testing teams are able to add scripts directly into the Cucumber framework as a scenario, enabling Agile Testing automaters to immediately begin automating every step in the script.

Cucumber also has versions in almost every Programming language, enabling Agile Testing teams globally to adopt BDD practices regardless of developing in C#, JAVA or .NET.

For example, if you’re using Ruby as your programming language of choice, there are numerous gems which enable Agile Testing teams to automate a wide variety of BDD test cases. Web testing becomes much simpler with watir-webdriver and database testing can be accomplished with ActiveRecord.

The Cucumber Advantage

However, Cucumber’s biggest strength in Agile Testing is that it enables collaboration amongst all Agile Team members, with the most common collaboration point Amigos Meeting. Here, Agile Testing converses with Agile Development and with the Product Owner to ensure all team members fully understand the User Story and all Acceptance Criteria.

By following BDD practices, all resulting Cucumber acceptance scripts are written in “the language of the business.” As the Agile Testing team members finish scripts, all team member can review them and ensure no test cases were missed and that they cover exactly what was expected.

With its ease of automation and strength as a collaboration tool, Aslak Helesoy’s Cucumber automation framework has been widely adopted by Agile Testing teams globally, becoming the BDD tool of choice.