Using Cucumber and Perl to define test cases in natural language
Veggie Option
The Cucumber test framework helps developers and product departments jointly formulate test cases, not as program code, but in plain English. The initially skeptical Perlmeister has acquired a taste for this.
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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