Th3 - Executable Requirements with Behaviour-Driven Development and Cucumber

Many testers have to comb through thick binders of functional requirements documentation to produce test scripts for a system. This is an error-prone and tedious job.  Over the past decade, automated functional testing has become an increasingly popular practice in many software development teams.

One of the latest developments in this field is Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). BDD is a technique that combines functional requirements and automated functional tests into one format - executable functional requirements.
Executable functional requirements (or automated tests that are readable by the business) require some kind of tool that can manage and execute them. There are several available tools that aim to do this, but most of them are either too technical, too expensive or too hard to use for most teams.

Cucumber is different. This is a novel, free, open source tool for BDD. While early BDD tools have been geared towards programmers, classes and objects, Cucumber nicely fills the communication gap between business analysts, programmers and testers.

Cucumber provides an extensible, but simple plain text language for describing system behaviour. Documents written in this language serve as functional requirements, documentation and automated tests.  Cucumber has gained a lot of popularity in the Ruby community. It also works with Java, Adobe Flex and web applications written in any language.

This presentation will introduce you to some of the BDD techniques and demonstrate how to write and execute requirements with Cucumber.

Key Points:    

• Test automation
• Behaviour Driven Development
• Cucumber language