Question

Have you used Cucumber in a production environment?

What problems did you find using it?

Would you recommend I use it?

I’m currently learning to use Cucumber with RSpec, I’m weighing up Pro’s and Con’s for using it in upcoming projects and would like some input. I will be using RSpec but I’m wondering if using Cucumber will be worth the extra time taken to write the tests.

Extra Information:

• I don’t deal with clients directly; however I do work in a team and deal with project managers who don’t have much technical knowledge so I thought the readability of Cucumber tests would prove useful

• The project sizes are medium to large, projects can have multiple phases and we maintain them

• Time restrictions are pretty tight however I’m thinking the extra test coverage would hopefully catch more bugs reducing time overall

Any information would be great

Cheers

Answer 1

Personally I don’t use Cucumber.

I imagine there are great use cases but I find the idea of writing plain english ‘cukes’ – that I then have to essentially write ruby regular expressions for to turn the plain english tests into ruby that can be run just too much of an overhead. That said, if you have business analysts or even the customer able to write tests then Cucumber is great since they can write english and you just have to worry about making it work.

We’ve opted to use Steak which is built straight on top of Rspec2 and Capybara and lets us write straight ruby tests which we feel are just as descriptive without the extra overhead.