Best Practices and Anti-Patterns in BDD Cucumber Automation - Part l
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Cucumber offer immense value to organizations when implemented correctly. However, after working with these practices for a decade, it becomes clear that certain mistakes and anti-patterns can undermine their effectiveness.
In this 2 part blog post, we will explore best practices and highlight common pitfalls to avoid when integrating BDD and Cucumber into your software development and automation testing process.
While we won't delve into coding specifics, we will focus on the collaborative aspects and how to bring these practices together effectively.
Collaboration and Three Amigos Session
Collaboration is a crucial component of BDD and often takes the form of a Three Amigos session. This session involves representatives from product ownership, business analysts, developers, and testers coming together to engage in conversations, collaborate, and question the requirements.
The primary objective is to define and refine acceptance criteria and create BDD scenarios. It is essential to have all three groups present to ensure a successful outcome. Missing this collaborative opportunity or attempting to write scenarios in isolation or retrospectively can undermine the value of BDD.
Writing Effective BDD Scenarios
When documenting BDD scenarios, it is important to focus on the end-to-end user journey rather than the specific interactions with the UI. The scenarios should be concise, readable, and easy to understand for anyone within the organization.
Avoid combining multiple requirements within a single scenario and aim for singularity, adhering to the golden rule of one requirement per scenario. By keeping the scenarios focused and free from unnecessary detail, you can minimize the impact of UI changes and ensure the scenarios remain relevant and effective.
The Given-When-Then Structure
The Given-When-Then gherkin syntax forms the foundation of BDD scenarios and each serves a distinct purpose. The "Given" step sets the starting state or circumstance for the user journey. The "When" step represents the user actions, driving the flow under test.
Finally, the "Then" step verifies the expected outcome or behavior. By using grammatically correct, concise, and natural language, scenarios become more readable and maintainable. Tense usage, such as past, present, or future tense, can further enhance scenario clarity and readability.
Enhancements and Additional Considerations
Narratives and background steps can be valuable additions to BDD features and scenarios. A narrative provides a short paragraph that adds context to the feature file, describing the user's intent or goal. Background steps, on the other hand, allow you to define steps that are common to multiple scenarios within a feature, improving maintainability and reducing duplication.
Incorporating Negative Behaviors and Error Conditions
To ensure comprehensive testing, it is essential to consider both positive and negative behaviors in BDD scenarios. By incorporating negative behavior and error condition testing, you can define and test how the application should handle failure or error scenarios. This includes exploring edge cases, error messages, and verifying that the application responds appropriately. Automation tests can then be used to validate these expected behaviors.
By following these best practices and avoiding common anti-patterns in the use of BDD with Cucumber for test automation, you can maximize the value of these practices and tools in your organization's delivery process. Collaboration, clear and concise scenarios, and thoughtful consideration of positive and negative behaviors are key to successful BDD implementation.
Remember, BDD is a conversational methodology that thrives on effective communication and collaboration between stakeholders.
Embrace these practices early on and adapt them as you progress, ensuring your automation tests drive the desired outcomes and contribute to a robust and efficient software delivery process.
In part 2, we will delve deeper into enhancing collaboration and improving test automation with the Page Object Model (POM) whilst also exploring additional best practices with Cucumber. We will examine the benefits of implementing the POM for code maintenance, readability, and reusability. Discover how the POM, when used alongside your step definitions, provides a structured framework for automated testing, improving overall test execution efficiency.
Get ready to dive into the practical aspects of implementing these powerful techniques and best practices in Part 2!
About Test Evolve - Test Evolve Spark, Flare, and Halo fully support BDD Features and Scenarios using Cucumber and Gherkin for building and executing tests. Additionally, you can code in Ruby, JavaScript, or TypeScript.
Try Test Evolve with a 30-day FREE trial and enjoy the numerous benefits of Cucumber. Start testing now!
