steak

The biggest gain of Cucumber I have seen is executable specifications. That is, every development task is described somewhere, whether it's pages and pages of a Google Doc or a couple lines in a Github issue. Code then gets implemented, and is almost certainly iterated over time. The question is, does the specification ever get updated to match the code's behavior? With Cucumber, you have a relatively clear specification (written in Gherkin's Given-When-Then syntax), and it always remains up-to-date because the developer needs to update it as corner cases or new scenarios arise. (Of course, this assumes you are running continuous integration with something like CircleCI and tracking code coverage with something like Coveralls.io.) I don't think there's anything magic about Cucumber, vs. Turnip <https://github.com/jnicklas/turnip>, or Spin

You should read http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/gui-programmer.html In practice, you'll find grep is in the toolkit of far more Ruby programmers than the IDE Rubymine. And with good reason! The real problem is step definitions with regex in them. You don't need to do this. Steak was written to avoid this problem: https://github.com/cavalle/steak But the underlying issue described in this post is still valid - Cucumber is an unnecessary layer because it adds no value that you don't get with Capybara and your favourite testing framework.

Lots of people like it, so I'm sure that there's an argument to be made for it, but it feels unnecessary and crufty. Personally, I think that the strongest case for it is that it lets your manager without any technical ability feel like he's a useful part of the process, but it just seems like a solution in search of a problem. Something like Steak (https://github.com/cavalle/steak) feels far more comfortable and readable to me.

I switched from Cucumber to Steak for several months and loved it. Getting away from english specification was a BIG win. However, two weeks ago, I removed Steak entirely, and am now using pure RSpec for my integration tests. If you look at the heart of Steak [1] you'll see it's nothing more than a couple aliases for existing RSpec methods. 'example' becomes 'scenario', and 'before' becomes 'background'. I'm all for accurate language, but I don't think switching a couple method names really changes anything important here. Switching from Steak to pure RSpec was simply a matter of a global search and replace, and now I've got one less gem to think about. [1] https://github.com/cavalle/steak/blob/master/lib/rspec-2/ste...

Cucumber is not really a native DSL. The scenario files are simply text files that are parsed (pattern matched) by Cucumber, which is a parser that's written in Ruby. It could well be written in Python, too. If you look at Steak (https://github.com/cavalle/steak), however, this is a real native Ruby DSL, and such a thing is impossible to ever do as elegant in Python.

Steak does sound good. It's a lot harder to look at than cucumber, but it is self-contained and simple. http://github.com/cavalle/steak Talking about steak makes me hungry.