I am reading a lot about Gherkin, and I had already read that it was not good to repeat steps, and for this it is necessary to use the keyword "Background", but in the example of this page they are repeating the same "Given" again and again, Could it be that I am doing wrong? I need to know your opinion about it:
Like with several things, this a topic that will generate different opinions. On this particular example I would have moved the "Given that I select the post" to the Background section as this seems to be a pre-requisite to all scenarios on this feature. Of course this would leave the scenarios in the feature without an actual Given section but those would be incorporated from the Background section on execution.
I have also seen cases where sometimes the decision of moving steps to the Background is a trade-off between having more or less feature files and how these are structured. For example, if there are 10 scenarios for a particular feature with a lot of similar steps between them - but there are 1 or 2 scenarios which do not require a particular step, then those 1 or 2 scenarios would have to moved into a new feature file in order to have the exact same steps on the Background section of the original feature.
Of course it is correct to keep the scenarios like this. From a tester's perspective, the Scenarios/Test cases should run independently, therefore, you can keep these tests separately for each functionality.
But in case you are doing an integration testing, then some of these test cases can be merged, thus you can cover multiple test cases in one scenario.
And the "given" statement is repeating, therefore you can put that in the background, so you don't have to call it in each scenarios.
Note: These separate scenarios will be handy when you run the scripts separately with annotation tags, when you just have to check for a specific functionality, or a bug fix.
Related
The problem is basically in the header: I have some scenarios with 20-30 steps and Background is not usable. So how do I split those scenarios to several ones with 5-6 steps in one scenario,as cucumber best practice suggests.
Any tips? Someone did this already ? Any examples?
First of all you can look at the subject of the feature and instead of having a file for that you can have a folder.
Lets say you have a feature login, which has now gotten really big
features
|- login.feature
features
login
login.feature
Now you can start making files to extract scenarios too
features
login
| admin_login.feature
| normal_login.feature
| 2factor_login.feature
It should be fairly clear that you can keep on repeating this pattern.
As far as analysing your scenarios in your existing files. You can
analyse your scenarios by topic and group them together
look for things that break a common background, i.e. need a different method in the background or need a new method in the background
Each of these will give you candidates to extract into new files.
You just keep on repeating this until you have clarity in all your feature files.
Extending the question Cleanup steps for Cucumber scenarios. I am aware that I can use tagged #After hooks to repeat the last few steps for all scenarios matching the tag. However, this implementation will be in my java classes and my business users will have no idea. Also my acceptance tests are huge, around 200. Lets say each feature file contains 10 scenarios and last 3-4 steps are common for all of them in that feature file. So i will have 20 feature file and 20 unique tags. I can create 20 #After hooks function and silently perform those steps. But how will my business owners know this if they cannot see these technical implementation?
The purpose of 'Background' tag is to repeat the same steps at beginning of the scenarios. We could have easily achieved this by using tagged #Before hooks, then why Background tag? If we have new feature of having 'Postground' tag, which is opposite of 'Background' tag, above problem can be solved. What do you think?
Note: I have logged an issue for this, but it got closed by #aslakhellosoy. I think I did not articulate the problem statement well.
Instead of repeating the same steps one by one, you can extract helper methods to perform the individual actions those steps perform, and call those helper methods either one by one in individual steps, or in sequence from the overarching step.
That way you can still make visible to the business users what happens, without having to spell out all the individual steps.
For more information, check the Cucumber documentation on Helper Methods.
If you still have more questions (I realise the documentation on Helper Methods isn't very extensive), please join the Cucumber Slack.
As we write feature file which contains several scenarios, which contains several closely worded, closely meaning step definitions, I am thinking of numbering them. Like if a step 3 of a scenario 2 would be named as s23. I tried doing it like...
Scenario: This is my scenario
Given S21the user has some thing
When S22the user does some thing
Then S23we can make sure some thing is anything.
This is supposedly help me identify the corresponding stepdefinition implementation methods quickly, and console log message linked to the step definitions etc.
But this resulted in the numbering S21,S22, S23 etc., getting treated as integer arguments in the auto generated step definitions. How can avoid that ?
Cucumber is a communication tool, not a test scripting language. Would your business users be able to understand this notation? Would it help them make sense of the scenarios? This kind of approach defeats the purpose of Cucumber as a living documentation and communication tool, and should be avoided. If your step definitions are ambiguous, add some more context (in business readable language) to make them less so.
Your IDE should help you step between Gherkin scenarios and the source code; you shouldn't need to have to add extra information in the scenarios for this.
You also don't need to use the auto generated step definitions - they are just there as a convenience and you can write your own.
We're using cucumberJS on a fairly large codebase with hundreds of cucumber scenarios and we've been running into issues with steps reuse.
Since all the steps in Cucumber are global, it's quite difficult to write steps like "and I select the first item in the list" or similar that would be similarly high-level. We end up having to append "on homepage" (so: "I select the first item in the list of folders on homepage") which just feels wrong and reads wrong.
Also, I find it very hard to figure out what the dependencies between steps are. For example we use a "and I see " pattern for storing a page object reference on the world cucumber instance to be used in some later steps. I find that very awkward since those dependencies are all but invisible when reading the .feature files.
What's your tips on how to use cucumber within a large team? (Including "ditch cucumber and use instead" :) )
Write scenarios/steps that are about what you are doing and why you are doing it rather than about how you do things. Cucumber is a tool for doing BDD. The key word here is Behaviour, and its interpretation. The fundamental idea behind Cucumber and steps is that each piece of behaviour (the what) has a unique name and place in the application, and in the application context you can talk about that behaviour using that name without ambiguity.
So your examples should never be in steps because they are about HOW your do something. Good steps never talk about clicking or selecting. Instead they talk about the reason Why you are clicking or selecting.
When you follow this pattern you end up with fewer steps at a higher level of abstraction that are each focused on a particular topic.
This pattern is easy to implement, and moderately easy to maintain. The difficulty is that to write the scenarios you have to have a profound understanding of what you are doing and why its important so you can discover/uncover the language you need to express yourself distinctly, clearly and simply.
I'll give my standard example about login. I use this because we share an understanding of What login is and Why its important. Realise before you can login that you have to be registered and that is complex.
Scenario: Login
Given I am registered
When I login
Then I should be logged in
The implementation of this is interesting in that I delegate all work to helper methods
Given I am registered
#i = create_registered_user
end
When I login
login_as(user: #i)
end
Then I should be logged in
should_be_logged_in
end
Now your problem becomes one of managing helper methods. What you have is a global namespace with a large number of helper methods. This is now a code and naming problem and All you have to do is
keep the number of helper methods as small as possible
keep each helper method simple
ensure there is no ambiguity between method names
ensure there is no duplication
This is still a hard problem, but
- its not as hard as what you are dealing with
- getting to this point has a large number of additional benefits
- its now a code problem, lots of people have experience of managing code.
You can do all these things with
- naming discipline (all my methods above have login in their name)
- clever but controlled use of arguments
- frequent refactoring and code cleaning
The code of your helper methods will have
- the highest churn of all your application code
- the greatest need to be simple and clear
So currently your problem is not about Cucumber its about debt you have with your existing scenarios and their implementation. You have to pay of your debt if you want things to improve, good luck
I have a specific scenario as follows:
if (element shows up on UI)
validate it
else
no harm done; move on...
If I know upfront if the element shows up or not, I can frame two different scenarios, when the element shows up and when not.
But, in this case, it may or may not be present. If it is present, it should function as expected.
Any suggestions on how this can be implemented in a Cucumber scenario(s) ?
I am using Cucumber-jvm.
You have two separate scenarios, you just need to be able to make sure you setup the preconditions to assume one scenario vs the other.
In general, you should not be implementing a conditional inside a single scenario, because your intent is to test two scenarios.