RSpec-2.0.0 is released

I used to feel the same, however having spent significant time on a project with a well-written (and factored) cucumber suite recently has brought me around to their camp. To each their own though, I suppose.

It reminds me of ANT and how it eventually became a (poor) programming language in XML. The idea of writing code in human text never really appealed to me (personally can't stand AppleScript).

That said, I haven't worked extensively with Cucumber and would love to hear opinions to the contrary. Hard to tell if it's a Ruby fad or a genuine improvement in workflow.

It's far from wasteful for us. The stories we write are exactly plain text which we have successfully had clients help us write. Unfortunately some programmers don't speak "plain text" and insist on writing code-like stories using "tables" instead which then can make it very, very wasteful.

For us, the mere excercise of writing the stories with customers has been very useful in getting the requirements out of their heads. We can then say "You helped us write these, the app does what you said you wanted it to" and there are less issues with communication.

It's saved us time and money. Here's just an example of how we use it, using EmailSpec.

    Given I'm logged in to the central authentication service as "bphogan"
    And I am on the home page
    Then I should see "Welcome, Brian"
    When I select "Administrative Information"
    And I follow "Change Address"
    Then I should see "Fill in this form to change your address"
    When I fill in "Address 1" with "123 Fake Stree"
    And I fill in "City" with "Springfield"
    And I select "OR" from "States"   
    And I fill in "12345" for "Postal Code"
    And I press "Change Address"
    Then I should see "Your address has been updated"
    And I should receive an email
    When I open the email
    Then I should see "We have updated your address"

That alone tells a client so much about what we're doing, and tells the developers what real tasks need to be extracted from the story to make it all pass. Things like "select" and "fill in" are already done for you. There are only two custom tasks in this scenario, and we wrote those once and share them across projects.

See http://elabs.se/blog/15-you-re-cuking-it-wrong and http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2010/09/cuking-it-right/