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Comment by phlyingpenguin | Hacker News Reader

One of the nice things about BDD tests in Cucumber/Gherkin is that they're written down in plain text (English), a language that managers, testers, and developers all presumably speak. The Gherkin language is actually very useful for facilitating communication/interactions.

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The myths of having non-developers read tests have been dispelled for years. I'm not even going there.

That's too broad a claim. Why are non-developers in your organization not willing/able to read test cases?

I've never worked somewhere where non-devs have done anything with tests. They've been too busy doing non-developery things.

I won't be quite so pessimistic about the possibilities as other people here, but I share their experiences. It seems possible in theory but nearly impossible in practice to walk the tightrope of creating a language convenient enough for non-technical people to read and write without getting frustrated by it, while retaining its programmability and maintainability without driving the developers crazy.

It's just a special case of the general problem with tools that aim to be easy for non-programmers to use while doing the same things as programming languages. It's always a leaky abstraction.

They haven't, in my direct experience.

I've found it very useful, where there's ambiguity about how a particular feature works, to write a Gherkin spec that describes it. It's easy to understand, and can be agreed upon or even edited by my colleagues who aren't developers, but remain part of a CI process.

YMMV, but this remains one of the lazier dismissals of BDD.

But non-developers read specs all the time. The BDD goal is to create readable specs that also work as executable tests.

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