I am still trying to totally understand BDD and I am facing some doubts.
From my little experience, I have been using it to automate user acceptance test and I would like to know if it’s possible to use it to test a web API, without UI.
In the past I’ve used BDD using the given-when-then jargon and mapping the steps to UI interactions. I’ve done this with Specflow in ASP.NET or cucumber/capybara in ruby on rails.
So for example we could have scenarios like this:
Given I am in the home page
When I click login button
Then I should see the login page
The current project I am working at is different. We are implementing an API based in web service which would be consumed by different type of clients. Like an iphone app, android app and an asp based web client. So our main focus is based in the back-end and just that.
In this case, the tests can’t be faced from the UI point of view. So our end-to-end tests are based in our service endpoints. We pass some input arguments to a service calls and check the outputs.
Can we do this using BDD? Is this right?
or maybe it would be better to use a different thing like FitNesse?
Hmm.. is using FitNesse doing BDD?
I think you can do what your writing about in BDD. I’m not sure if those 2 links about testing of webservices with SpecFlow will help you but take a look on them if you haven’t seen it yet.
http://codedetective.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/testing-webservices-with-specflow.html
http://www.creamdog.se/blog/2011/02/24/webservices-automated-tests-using-specflow-and-babelfish/