Testing with Cucumber – best practices

When I was first starting to really TDD with rails, cucumber was my framework of choice.

I remember the battles with myself for writing tests, how should I test, and the step definitions.

With cucumber there's just too much plumbing, not only that you need to figure out the test, you need to figure out how to set up the test and the definitions.

It never worked for me, it was just never in a state of flow like Rspec or any other testing framework for that matter, too much magic going on.

Today, I do 100% Rspec on the projects I work on, of course test-unit when I am working on rails, but other then that, I have never seen anyone using Cucumber outside of tutorials and just testing things out.

I think Thoughtbot are using Cucumber if I remember from their blog posts, for me it didn't work.

That being said, I love seeing companies share knowledge, especially in the form of videos, the editing time and recording time are not something that most companies want to invest. For that you deserve a kudos from me.

Tip #2 "Insert a Narrative" or describe what the test is and why it is important seems to be a lot more about "literate programming" than BDD. I am actually coming to TDD/BDD not for the testing but for the fact that it seems to be a more useful way of writing specs that can be integrated with UX design quite well. I keep feeling like maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick with my approach to cucumber...

I'm a big fan of TDD. But BDD is just such an overkill for me. I could never understand it. It takes all the joy out of programming away by introducing the level of abstraction that's just to much to deal with. Sometimes layering up must stop.

Best practise is to not use cucumber! By the time yoi have wanked away the afternoon writing stories, the client found a real developer who already coded the feature, leaving you - the failed liberal arts major, and now failed developer sobbing over your hipster hot beverage of choice.