CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch1 1w3 pl

Unit-Testing Frameworks for Ruby: Cucumber

This wiki-page serves as a knowledge source for understanding Unit-Testing Frameworks available for Ruby particularly Cucumber .

Introduction

Unit testing is a software development process for testing individual units of source code independently for proper operation ^[1]. An unit testing framework helps the process of unit testing by automating the test cases which are written to ensure the correctness of the system . Ruby provides a framework in its standard library for setting up, organizing, and running tests called Test::Unit ^[2]. Other testing framework available for ruby are Shoulda, RSpec, Cucumber.

Cucumber

Cucumber is one of the latest unit test frameworks to have come for Ruby as part of the RSpec family of tools. Cucumber is written in the Ruby programming language and adheres to behaviour driven development(BDD). Behaviour Driven Development is an Agile Development process that comprises aspects of Acceptance Test Driven Planning , Domain Driven Design and Test Driven Development (TDD). Cucumber is designed specifically to ensure the acceptance tests can easily be read and written by anyone.

Behaviour Driven Development(BDD)

BDD preserves the basic iterative (fail-pass) workflow of TDD, but stresses on specifying behaviors that are understandable to people (say from non programming background). In this approach we write tests in a natural language such that even a non programmer can understand.

Acceptance Test

Acceptance Test Drive Planning is practice that stresses on the importance of the identifying the functions and requirements of the software beforehand so that we exactly get to know when our development phase is over. This practice results in fewer bugs , shorter delivery times and great customer satisfaction.