Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

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We have Cucumber tests and Rspec tests in our repository.

They are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Cucumber tests are integration tests and usually test only the happy path. In our case, a customer never sees those tests. OTOH for new developers, it's a very good way to find out how a given feature should work.

Making a test in Cucumber for checkIfFriday() would be flagged in a code review. That's for a unit test, not an integration test.

Complex test setups are way easier in Cucumber than in Rspec. They are usually more realistic than the Rspec ones. In the unit you can more easily cheat your way out of a correct setup.

One of the bigger problems I have with it is that discovering existing cucumber steps is hard. They are free form so anything goes and if you aren't careful, you will have a plethora of steps that are similar but different and someone without a lot of experience will not be able to tell which step is more suitable for a given scenario.

> One of the bigger problems I have with it is that discovering existing cucumber steps is hard.

When I was using Cucumber, we almost picked up Turnip to solve that one.

For anyone that doesn't know Cucumber, you have one global context for all expressive sentences. So if you say "I click on the big red button" then there has to be one reliable way to detect the big red button on whatever page you're on, and it has to be the same way in every context.

In Turnip, you can declare contexts (like namespaces or modules) that allow you to have the same expression mean different things in each context. Only problem is, Turnip is even more obscure than Cucumber, and even fewer people know what it is, let alone having used Cucumber well enough to understand what all that means and what Turnip is for.

The other problem being, having a single global context for understanding the meaning of words arranged into sentences was a very powerful tool for promoting reuse and expressive clarity: if you found yourself using the same utterance in two different contexts, it was expected that you'd clarify so they could be distinguished and understood separately in a context-free grammar.

Not needed anymore in Turnip, unless you're diligent about reaching for the existing modules that you've created. (On the other hand, having your test utterances sorted into modules makes it a lot easier to reach for them, among related utterances...)

To clarify, checkIfFriday() is supposed to be a random trivial non test-related piece of code. My rhetorical question was, "would you like to maintain a world of extra Cucumber on top of it?".

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