CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railscucumberbdd
usha
usha

Reputation: 29349

Rails BDD: Cucumber alternatives

I am looking for a plain english BDD tool for ruby on rails application. I have used Cucumber long back and i really liked it.

I am trying to find out if there are any alternatives for cucumber and how good are they compared to cucumber.

I know there are many questions about this in SO. But they are really old and most of the other tools didn't exist at that time.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2155

Answers (2)

Piotr Brudny
Piotr Brudny

Reputation: 656

I have been using Cucumber for last 4 years but now I am moving to Spinach. It is like Cucumber in terms of gherkin (scenarios in plain english) but steps are in Ruby without any crazy regex. Obviously you can use Capybara, Rspec, Minitest with it.

It is much cleaner solution and it is easier to keep to the latest BDD good practises.

Right now I am using both frameworks (Cucumber, Spinach) on the same project until I move all features to Spinach.

Upvotes: 1

Billy Chan
Billy Chan

Reputation: 24815

If some important readers of the tests, say clients, want to read the tests and they don't know programming, there is no good alternative of Cucumber to write tests as plain text, as I know.

But Cucumber comes with cost. You need to write plain text and write code to parse it. A programmer can read the tests code directly without plain text as media. If the clients don't need to read tests and but the stories only, Cucumber is not necessary.

So there came the Steak gem, which uses Ruby and Cucumber like syntax to write tests, direct tests, no plain text to parse.

But later, this gem is out of date because Capybara has eaten Steak. Capybara now has same BBD syntax like feature(which equals describe in Rspec), scenario which equals it and so on.

So my conclusion is, if no need to prepare plain text for sombody outside of developers to read, use Capybara, good and simple. Otherwise still use Cucumber.

Upvotes: 3

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