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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T05:24:14+00:00

Is it acceptable to write a Given When Then When Then test in Gherkin?

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Is it acceptable to write a “Given When Then When Then” test in Gherkin?
A real-life example is as follows all AllPlayers.com

Scenario: Successfully register a user
  Given I am on homepage
    And I am not logged into an account
  When I follow "create a new account"
    And I fill in "First Name" with "Bobby"
    And I fill in "Last Name" with "Bricks"
    And I fill in "E-mail" with "bbricks@example.com"
    And I select "Jun" from "Birthday Month"
    And I select "22" from "Birthday Day"
    And I select "1985" form "Birthday Year"
    And I select "Male" from "Gender"
    And I fill in "Password" with "123testing"
    And I fill in "Confirm Password" with "123testing"
    And I solve the captcha math problem
    And I click "Create new account"
  Then I should see "the user dashboard"
    And I should see the Registration Wizard
  When I push "Proceed to next step"
  Then the "First Name" field should contain "Bobby"
    And the "Last Name" field should contain "Bricks".

I know it works using behat, so parsing it isn’t a problem. I’m just trying to write better tests. I could write in the first then And the Registration Wizard should be filled out with data but that doesn’t seem specific enough…

Suggestions?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It depends on the target audience of the feature as written. It seems highly likely that the gherkin you’ve got there was not written with a stakeholder (i.e. somebody not-techie but has a vested interest in the business and the website). BDD is really about the conversation about requirements and expectations – and Gherkin is a tool which gives a standard/recognised way that everyone should be able to read that you can write the requirements and expectations; in a way that serves as automated tests for a developer and perhaps test scripts for a tester.

    Trying to take my developer hat off now – I would say that a business stakeholder would rather read, and understand easily…

    Scenario: Should be able to successfully register on website
    Given I am new to the website
    And I want to register for a user account
    When I go to the registration form
    And I complete all the required registration details correctly
    Then I will be registered on the website
    And I will be automatically logged in

    You can still build the same test behind the scenes of this specification – but this specification has larger readership, it is a more easily understood requirement that anyone should understand. I’m not saying what you have got has no value – far from it. It will be a very valid test. But it is quite developer specific, and highly coupled to the UI implementation (if you refactor/redesign the UI, you now need to refactor your Requirements…).

    I started off having plenty of gherkin specifications much like yours – and I still use them on occasion. Once your testing framework has built up a little gherkin is a really great way of kind of writing data-driven/configurable unit tests; and they still have great value to my development process. But I do try to separate the more “pure” specifications from my “developer” ones – but folder and tags/categories.

    Edit: I guess in summary what I’m getting at is… what you have is a great “test”, but a fairly bad “requirement”. Stick with it though!

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