Cucumber

Cucumber is a tool that executes plain-text functional descriptions as automated tests. The language that Cucumber understands is called Gherkin. Here is an example:

Feature: Search courses

 In order to ensure better utilization of courses

 Potential students should be able to search for courses

 Scenario: Search by topic

   Given there are 240 courses which do not have the topic "biology"

   And there are 2 courses A001, B205 that each have "biology" as one of the topics

   When I search for "biology"

   Then I should see the following courses:

     | Course code |

     | A001       |

     | B205       |

While Cucumber can be thought of as a “testing” tool, the intent of the tool is to support BDD. This means that the “tests” (plain text feature descriptions with scenarios) are typically written before anything else and verified by business analysts, domain experts, etc. non technical stakeholders. The production code is then written outside-in, to make the stories pass.

Cucumber itself is written in Ruby, but it can be used to “test” code written in Ruby or other languages including but not limited to Java, C# and Python. Cucumber only requires minimal use of Ruby programming and Ruby is easy, so don’t be afraid even if the code you’re developing in is not Ruby.

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