Comment by urxvtcd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by urxvtcd | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I share the sentiment. What it boils down to is that you need to write the test two times. The supposed feature that once written the keywords can be reused is mostly a joke. There will be few heavily-used keywords, and a really long tail of one-time keywords, which is a pain.

I see a single advantage to these frameworks though. They force you to write a test in a specific way that looks like a real-world scenario with clear delineations between setup stages, assertions, and so on. Not that it's impossible to achieve with regular programming language, obviously.

I like using catch2 (c++ test framework). the keywords are only reused when they group together in the code.

    GIVEN("Some setup") {
        // code to create the setup
        WHEN("some use of the setup") {
            // do something
        }
        WHEN("something else"){
            // do something unrelated to the previous when
       }
    }

> The supposed feature that once written the keywords can be reused is mostly a joke.

I've seen well maintained and designed cucumber / rspec / robotframework "code" and i've seen some really horrible shit. Keyword re-use is really a joke if you are not familiar with any good practices to actual software development. Granted, in "low code" scenarios, the worst selling point is "you don't need to know how to write code" - which imho is bullshit and from my pov, statements like i quoted echoes that.

Disclaimer; i partake and contribute to RF ecosystem. And i do prefer to write my tests or process automation with it even thought i can write code in multiple languages..

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