Hacker News Reader

This is a good overview of property based testing but the mentions of Cucumber threw me off.

In my job Cucumber seems to add little more than just commenting and sequencing functions, tasks that are better suited to your programming language of choice, while adding overhead and complexity.

What am I missing?

View on HN

To me, Cucumber is a way to write executable specifications that can also be read by non-developers. This can be tremendously powerful if done judiciously, or tremendously pointless if not. This may be because you do not in fact want or need executable specification, or perhaps because there's nobody interested in reading it.

I believe that Cucumber is at its best in situations where it's clear to all parties that a specification is valuable. In that case, making the specification executable is very clearly a massively useful way to spend your time.

But if they're only read, not written, by non-developers, wouldn't it make more sense to generate a report from your spec code, rather than using the report as a cumbersome authoring language?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com