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angularjstestingcucumberjs
Bruce Yang
Bruce Yang

Reputation: 67

Cucumber.js testing without relying any web browsers(Headless or real web browsers)

I was a .net based windows application developer and being a web developer now. For the last couple of years, I tried to follow principles of Specification by example in a project. On the last project I was involved, our team used WPF with MVVM(Model-View-ViewModel) pattern and I tried SpecFlow for testing. (Well.. the coverage by SpecFlow was very low though cause it was not officially adopted from our team and I couldn't spend enough time on it.)

Now our team started to migrate the existing windows application to a web based application and decided to use cucumber.js as a tool for implementing 'Specification by example'.

When I was trying SpecFlow before, I made all the step definitions to test ViewModel layer instead of View and it was the only way actually. What I'm confused with cucumber.js is that most of examples demonstrate how to test features via web browsers(headless or real ones).

If the features are specifying specific ui behaviors then accessing a DOM element and evaluating its value make sense. However, as far as I learned about Specification by examples, testing under the UI layer is recommended instead of UI elements directly.

It seems like most of modern web applications have layers such as MVC, MVVM(knouckout.js) nowadays. Our web application will use Angularjs and this is my theory.

I guess it is possible to use feature files - which do not state any specific UI controls and behaviors - to test under the skin of UI layer, without relying browser support. That layer would be Model of angularjs, not ui elements.

Is this approach missing something or wrong with cucumber.js? Please give me some insights and correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 527

Answers (1)

Dan
Dan

Reputation: 3258

Specification by example specifies requirements by giving examples from the point of view of the user. What's more representative of the user: clicking items on a web page, or directly calling code? A user won't be calling methods on your view model, so in my opinion a feature test is a much better way to test expected behaviour.

Upvotes: 1

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