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by collinf 2860 days ago
It always really bothered me that there had to be so much syntactical sugar on top of testing frameworks. Unit testing should be written in exactly the syntax of the language you are working with. I don't want to have to carry that additional crap in my working memory while writing code. I can't stand having to look up Gherkin syntax just to write a few dumb tests.

The only reason I see the usefulness of additional syntax just for tests is the case to have non-technical people writing tests. From my experience, this is a terrible idea.
2 comments
a_imho 2860 days ago
OTOH never rule out how KISS is the enemy of billable hours and don't underestimate CDD's ability (consultability driven development) to come up with solutions to non problems.

YMMV, the BDD implementations I've seen so far did not convince me of its value to put it mildly.

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bramblerose 2860 days ago
I never understood the value of Gherkin/Cucumber style testing until I worked with a QA engineer. The engineer started writing the tests (in Cucumber format) as a way to write __manual__ tests: they allow you to write 'do this, then that, verify this' in a structured manner. Automating this was a secondary goal: once you have (relatively) structured manual tests, it's nice if you can automate them, while still retaining the possibility to run them manually. This is actually important, and they would typically be end-to-end UI tests, which can be quite fragile when completely automated. Having them in a human-friendly format allows you to have a manual fallback if e.g. a changed identifier blocks you from running the automated test.
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lotyrin 2860 days ago
Yep. The value of Given When Then ends, not begins, once you have implemented the steps with some automation.
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davydog187 2860 days ago
Oh man, I wonder how your opinions would change if you used a language with great first class testing. Elixir's unit testing framework is part of the language, and is excellent. https://hexdocs.pm/ex_unit/master/ExUnit.html

Its not really about syntactical sugar, and more about being able to see the data the failed, and make the testing experience easy so that you can write tests with less effort

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