Is Cucumber automation killing your project?

In a recent webinar, Nikolay Advolodkin, the software testing enthusiast, pointed out how using Cucumber without following the BDD process is unworthy. It may actually complicate what is basically hard.

1/ Automation is indeed pretty hard

At the beginning, he mentioned that testing automation is mainly a hard task because:

• there is too much to learn (Selenium, Appium...)
• we need to know how to apply the automation pyramid (Unit, API and E2E testing)
• we need to learn how to use automation tools (Cucumber, Saucelabs, Mocha)

2/ So keep it simple Stupid (KISS)

By making wise decisions concerning:

• making a UI test for a feature rather than a unit test (==> thousands of times slower and drastically inefficient due to maintenance cost)
• the decision to recreate our page object model versus using an existent proven one
• or picking a tool that has excellent reporting for the reporting mechanisms versus picking the right tool for the job

3/ But, what if we ask some questions regarding the use of Cucumber

• Who writes the business specs along with the developer and the BA before starting development (32% Yes VS 68% No)
• Who uses Cucumber? (54% Yes VS 46% No)
• Conclusion: Cucumber is widely used even when not following BDD (Behavior Driven Development)

4/ Now, trying to compare writing code for a login test with Selenium then with Cucumber, he realized:

• Test written with Selenium is readable and easy for anyone to understand
• Running it against a collection of different browsers, browser versions, operating systems and platform is easy

Recreating the same test with Cucumber led to a big file with tons of dependencies. Nikolay spent more than 3h without figuring out how to add parallel test execution using Cucumber.

5/ So here are challenges to overcome with Cucumber

• How to write correct gherkin (manual+automated) with more than 100 rules?
• How to use Regex (manual+automated)?
• How to manage step definition? "A user creates ans account" VS "A user makes an account" or "A user opens an account"
• How to do cross platform parallelization?

Whereas, the only valid challenges should be limited to:

• How to create proper page objects?
• and How to use the automation framework?

6/ Conclusively, Cucumber without BDD is an Anti-pattern, as enunciated from the beginning by its creator