BDD (2) — Cucumber & Gherkin.

In our previous post Behavior Driven Development we discussed BDD. Here, let's look at Cucumber. The flagship BDD framework for java, but not limited to Java.

Why Cucumber

As we saw in the previous post, until the Automation phase, BDD is all about discovering and formulating behavioral scenarios through collaboration. Its the automation phase, where things really happen.

It would be easy if we could write these behavioral scenarios in plain English (or another preferred spoken language) and runtime could understand and execute those for us. This is where Cucumber comes to the rescue.

Cucumber

Cucumber is a framework that let us write application-behavioral-expectations in meaningful spoken-language-text using Gherkin.

Cucumber implementations are available in many programming languages as shown below.

Courtesy — Cucumber.io supported programming languages

NOTE: It's recommended (not mandatory) to choose an implementation for the same platform or programming language as your production code.
However, if your behavioral tests codebase is under a different repo than your application code, and it's built and run on a different container or machine or environment. in that case you are free to choose any programing language of your liking.

Gherkin

Gherkin is a set of grammar rules that makes spoken-language-text structured enough for Cucumber to understand.

Gherkin has fixed keywords. When those Gherkin-keywords are used in a specific syntax, the cucumber engine translates them as instructions to execute. Gherkin-keywords are available in many spoken languages, in this post we’ll discuss only English Keywords.

Gherkin-keywords:

The Main (not all) keywords for the English language are:

Feature
Scenario / Example (Synonyms)
Given
When
Then
And
But
*
Scenario Outline
Background
#

Cucumber tests are written with Gherkin grammar within a file ending with .feature extension, also called feature-file.

This was a quick overview of Cucumber & Gherkin. In the next post Anatomy of Feature File we see how can we make use of these Gherkin keywords within a feature-file with proper grammar to write meaningful behavioral tests.

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