Using Cucumber and Perl to define test cases in natural language
I'm a practical thinker and a realist – a natural combination, I find. In regard to developer frameworks for non-programmers, however, this means that when a new software product claims to support development on the basis of mouse clicks or descriptive text instead of code, I tend to steer clear. Experience has shown that, although simple solutions can be created with natural-language means, these projects reach their limits as tasks grow increasingly complex. When this occurs, the developer may have to ditch the project and re-implement everything from scratch in a proper programming language.
Perlmeister Stands Corrected
A few years ago when I first heard about the Cucumber project [1], which describes test cases for software projects in natural language, I immediately suspected a retake of the familiar "you-don't-need-programming-skills" mantra. My reflex was to turn my back on Cucumber and steer toward things with more substance. But, it seems I was wrong, because the project has gained much popularity among serious developers in the meantime.
In the end, I revised my own opinion. The decisive factor was reading the book about the Cucumber project [2]. The 300-page book explores the functions of the toolset in detail and shows step by step how a useful test suite is created during a real-life software project.
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