Presentation that I gave to the Groovy Users of Minnesota group on May 11, 2010. Using Cucumber, cuke4duke, and Groovy together for acceptance test-driven development.

1. Cucumber, cuke4duke, and Groovy
Christopher Bartling

2. Summary
• Acceptance Test-driven Development
• Introduce Cucumber concepts
• Introduce cuke4duke’s role
• Introduce Groovy’s role
• Demonstration and discussion

3. Presentation materials
• https://bitbucket.org/cebartling/
presentations/
• Presentation and demo in repository

4. Why?
• Customer/business not engaged in story
process
• User stories without good acceptance tests
• Ambiguous “developer done”

5. Acceptance Test-Driven
Development
• Acceptance tests are owned by the
customer/business owner
• Specify the “what” of a feature
• Expressed in the language of the problem
domain
• Written as a team

6. Why ATDD?
• Features need to be unambiguously and
concisely specified
• Developers need to know when they are
done with a feature
• Automated testing to ensure features never
regress/break

7. Cucumber
• A behavior-driven development (BDD) tool
• Outside-in testing
• Business-readable DSL
• Implemented in Ruby, runs on JRuby
• Supports tests in tables, ala FIT
• http://cukes.info/

8. Cucumber
• Features and scenarios
• Steps
• Step definitions
• Hooks
• Tags

9. Features
• Features are modules of functionality
• Feature files have a .feature extension
• Written in Gherkin
• Contain one or more scenarios

10. Feature example
Feature: Serve coffee
In order to earn money
Customers should be able to
buy coffee at all times

11. Organizing Features
• The features directory can contain
subdirectories of feature themes
features
insurance
accounts_payable
invoicing

12. Scenarios
• Consist of steps
• Given, When, and Then
• Executable via matching step definitions
• http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/
2008/11/27/the-truth-about-bdd

13. Steps
• Given: put the system in a known state
• When: describes the key action
• Then: observe outcome(s)
• Use And and But to augment the three
steps

14. Step definitions
• Executable code
• Use regular expressions to match the steps
in feature files
• Typically written in Ruby
• Foreshadow: cuke4duke allows any JVM
language to be used

15. Hooks
• Allows running code at various points of
the Cucumber test cycle
• Typically reside in the support directory
• Scenario hooks: Before, After
• Step hooks: AfterStep

16. Background
• Add context to a set of scenarios in a
feature
• Run before each scenario, but after the
Before hooks
• Typically consist of Given and And steps

17. Tags
• Allow categorization of features and
scenarios
• Features and scenarios can have multiple tags
@dbunit-load
Scenario: Delete a photo album

18. Tagged hooks
• Allows fine-grained control of hooks for
certain features or scenarios
Before(‘@dbunit-load’)

19. cuke4duke
• Brings Cucumber to the JVM via JRuby
• No need to program in Ruby
• Step definitions, hooks and other
supporting classes can be implemented in a
variety of JVM languages

20. JRuby dependency
• Use the following system property to install
Ruby gems for use by cuke4duke
-Dcucumber.installGems=true
• Necessary for first-time installs and
cuke4duke upgrades

21. cuke4duke
• Ant support
• Maven support via plugin
• Spring Framework support (Java step
definitions only)
• Google Guice support

22. Filtering with tags
• Tags are helpful for filtering groups of
scenarios during a execution run
• Ensure Maven POM has cukeArgs as a pass-
through argument
<cucumberArg>${cukeArgs}</cucumberArg>
• Use the work in progress tag: @wip
mvn cuke4duke:cucumber -DcukeArgs="--tags @wip"

23. Groovy’s role
• Step definitions can be written in many JVM
languages
• Groovy works well for step definitions and
other helper objects

24. cuke4duke.GroovyDsl
• Given, When, Then DSL for your Groovy
step definitions
• No need to use Java annotations

25. WebDriver
• Web UI testing tool
• Being merged with Selenium for 2.0 release
• Native browser control, not JavaScript
• Firefox extension
• Internet Explorer Automation controls
• Object-based API

26. PageObjects pattern
• Use the PageObject pattern to verify web
elements on a page
• DRY up your verification logic
• Use PageFactory to bind the WebDriver
and WebElement objects to your
PageObject implementation

27. Cucumber book
• Co-authored by Aslak Hellesøy
• Creator of Cucumber and
cuke4duke

28. Interesting reads
• http://blog.dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story/
• http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/
BusinessReadableDSL.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Behavior_driven_development

29. Contact information
• chris.bartling@gmail.com
• Twitter: cbartling
• Blog: http://bartling.blogspot.com