Conveying Intent - Why Cucumber is Still Relevant

In a world of in-demand minds and ever changing job positions, your project better be ready to get developers up to speed quick. How do we do this? We show them the manual of course. Wait… you guys have a manual for your project, right?

You probably already do. It’s called your test suite. In particular, your Cucumber features. Cucumber allows us to write how a feature is intended to work and then assert that it does. It is a great way to exercise the entire stack but an even better way to educate on how your application behaves.

This talk will go through why cucumber is still relevant in a sea of fast running tests, why every chosen word in your feature is important, and ways to get the most out of your integration suite.

- Presented to WindyCityRails 2014

Transcript

1. Conveying Intent W h y C u c u m b e r i s S t i l l R e l e v a n t
2. Demand
3. 2.8%
6. Getting up to speed
7. Legacy Software
8. “Any software where the context for earlier design decisions is no longer available”
9. –Probably Noel Rappin “Any software where the context for earlier design decisions is no longer available”
10. How does this 
 app work?
11. RTFM, amiright?
12. Look at the test suite, bro
13. Cucumber/Integration tells us plainly how the app works
14. What is Cucumber?
19. –Martin Fowler “Will DSLs allow business people to write software rules without involving programmers?”
20. –Martin Fowler “the greatest potential benefit of DSLs comes when business people participate directly in the writing of the DSL code”
21. –Martin Fowler “The sweet spot, however is in making DSLs business-readable rather than business-writeable”
22. Yawning Crevasse of Doom
26. Imperative vs. Declarative
27. Cucumber is so boring!
28. Tell a story
31. Elements of storytelling
32. Character Challenge Resolution
33. Character Challenge Resolution
34. Character Challenge Resolution
35. Use pop culture
39. Character Challenge Resolution
40. Elements of a scenario
41. Setup Action Assertion
42. Setup Action Assertion
43. Setup Action Assertion
44. Setup Action Assertion Given When Then
52. Domain Language
55. Client
56. Developer
57. Communicate the general behavior of your code
58. Works for me
59. It’s OK to refactor scenarios
60. It’s OK to change language
61. Use tags
64. Feature meta is it necessary?
66. Group together Given, When, Then
68. Until you shouldn’t
73. @mattpolito
74. Thanks