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BDD With Cucumber

Gooi Liang Zheng • October 13, 2017 • Selangor, Malaysia • Talk

Summary of the Video: BDD With Cucumber

The video features a presentation by Gooi Liang Zheng on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) using Cucumber, delivered at RubyConf MY 2017. The main focus is on educating the audience about BDD, its principles, and practical implementations using Cucumber within a software development context.

Key Points Discussed:

  • Introduction to BDD:

    • BDD is a refinement of Test-Driven Development (TDD). It emphasizes collaboration among stakeholders (customers, developers, testers) to clearly define features from the user's perspective and articulate requirements as acceptance tests.

  • Personas in BDD:

    • The significance of having distinct roles in the BDD process including product managers for user needs, developers for feasibility and technology concerns, and testers for defining acceptance criteria.

  • Cucumber Overview:

    • Cucumber is a tool used to translate business requirements into a usable format for developers, written in the Gherkin language, which is user-friendly and can be understood by non-developers.
    • Gooi emphasizes that Cucumber is not just a testing tool but rather a medium to facilitate clear communication about requirements and behaviors.

  • Writing Scenarios:

    • Cucumber scenarios should follow a given-when-then structure promoting clarity in user behavior expectations during testing. Examples are provided to illustrate this structure.

  • Implementation in a Company:

    • Gooi shares how his company uses Cucumber for developing features, beginning with writing scenarios prior to coding, and using them to validate new features in development and during regression testing.
    • Challenges discussed include maintaining consistency in writing Cucumber specifications and ensuring the accessibility of documentation to non-technical stakeholders.

  • Collaboration with Non-Developers:

    • Strategies for engaging product managers in writing Gherkin scenarios are highlighted, suggesting that non-developers should be trained to utilize Gherkin syntax for documentation purposes, thus enhancing shared understanding.

Important Examples and Takeaways:

  • Example mapping in workshops involving multiple stakeholders is discussed as a valuable approach to refine and understand user stories. This collaborative method allows teams to create cohesive, clear scenarios that can lead to more effective development processes.
  • The video highlights the practical advantages of using Cucumber, such as improved documentation, regression testing, and coherent communication across teams.

In conclusion, Gooi Liang Zheng's talk on BDD with Cucumber emphasizes the importance of collaboration, clear communication, and systematic testing processes in software development, recommending Cucumber as a robust solution for bridging gaps between technical and non-technical team members.

BDD With Cucumber
Gooi Liang Zheng • October 13, 2017 • Selangor, Malaysia • Talk

Speaker: Gooi Liang Zheng

Website: http://rubyconf.my

Produced by Engineers.SG

RubyConf MY 2017

00:00:06.090 hello yeah good morning everyone so today I'll be talking about BDD with
00:00:13.740 cucumber so a little background of me so angry
00:00:21.470 it's easier to remember if you know like graphical user interface that sounds the
00:00:26.550 same so in like normal lectures when they talk about that and like seems that
00:00:33.090 I've been called I'm a software engineering on app and I work with Java
00:00:40.199 Python and wah so Java as a meter and fightin as the server-side configuration
00:00:46.890 and all sold wha for engine X and Ruby so yeah I'm also an active member of
00:00:55.760 geography Bill Gates and I do a lot of volunteering jobs not jobs volunteering
00:01:03.589 events for real skills and also reach out to universities helping to growth
00:01:11.250 Alan's in Malaysia so a background my company so our company does cloud
00:01:18.810 infrastructures so we do VMs DNS CDN cloud storage disaster recovery so we
00:01:27.299 are like a b2b service where we sell all the cloud infrastructures to our clients
00:01:32.430 to compete with someone like AWS and so our office is doing the CDN portion so
00:01:41.640 we have like 170 plus location worldwide
00:01:46.970 our job mostly is maintaining ages and also parallel service we'll have like
00:01:53.220 video streaming file caching like images CSS JavaScript and live streaming so
00:02:01.610 that's about it so let's talk about what you expect for this talk so you know
00:02:08.399 about what is BDD after this talk of introduction to cucumber and also how
00:02:15.420 our company on app using cucumber so first well it's BDD so BDD is a
00:02:25.660 synthesis and refinement of practice stemming from TDD and a TDD so what is
00:02:34.320 80 DB so 80 DB is a certain test-driven development which have been used mainly
00:02:43.090 for product design so when you have product design you have like this kind
00:02:48.820 of process where you have three different hats so you will have a person
00:02:54.100 a group of person people that represent customer a group of people that represents development and testing so
00:03:01.750 all three groups of people will work together to come up with exceptin has
00:03:08.410 the requirements for the feature and its also represent the user point of view
00:03:15.460 and act as a point as a form of requirements that describe how the system should function in some cases we
00:03:25.660 also are the T most ultimate the acceptance test so next is test-driven
00:03:33.220 government GDD that's the common stuff in like Ruby community so test-driven
00:03:40.960 development refers to a style of programming which consists of three main activities which is coding testing and
00:03:48.160 design so first we will write unit tests then we run the even test so write a
00:03:55.750 minimal behavior that you expect to behave on your feature and then write
00:04:03.580 your code so this code is mainly to pass unit tests because you are trying to
00:04:10.340 produce some behavior that you expected and then refactor make sure your code is
00:04:17.449 clean and it can be maintained for long term while passing the unit test and
00:04:23.229 then you repeat the process all together okay so next so this is the BDD tactics
00:04:35.320 for practicing BDD so first use the
00:04:41.900 story so you apply the five wise principle to each proposed user story so
00:04:47.330 that the purpose is clearly related to business outcomes so five wise as in
00:04:52.450 wh-why so I ask the question why four five times why do you need this and then
00:04:59.150 why continuing asking why we'll make it very clear that what your features is
00:05:05.630 about and also next thing is behavior that consider behavior that contribute
00:05:12.470 the most so thinking from the outside in you will implement that the features
00:05:19.729 that's more resonance to the client so you don't create stuff that your client
00:05:26.030 doesn't need and then the next thing is to describe in single notation this is very important because when you design
00:05:33.950 certain stuff right you design a feature where certain keywords are very specific
00:05:42.050 for for programmers and it's not understandable by designers so to make
00:05:47.840 sure that everyone in the same page do use the single notation to translate and
00:05:53.479 also express your features so that every single one in the different group of
00:05:59.360 your team understand what you're talking about not using specialized keywords
00:06:05.650 because no one will understand that and then applying this technique all the
00:06:11.950 way down to the lowest levels of abstraction of the software and paying
00:06:18.330 attention to the distribution of the behavior because you were easy for you
00:06:24.910 to maintain or change if you really understand what the system all about so do understand the behavior that you
00:06:32.620 stret spread around until the lowest level to recap so BDD is to help create
00:06:43.230 understanding of the business requirement and also help to design the
00:06:49.960 feature and also serve as documentation and taste test cases so go school Asik
00:06:59.320 is one of the prominent figure in agile and software the woman she described
00:07:05.230 BDDs specification by example so he also
00:07:10.330 wrote two books which is impact mapping and also by the title specification by
00:07:16.960 example so to practice this lets consists of two activities the three
00:07:23.140 amigos this is the first activities where you have a specific Gatien
00:07:28.750 workshop so first you will have the project for that manager which will
00:07:35.380 describe the user needs in the user side was the story so you have a requirements
00:07:42.160 user behavior what customer wanted and the next thing is the developer so the
00:07:49.480 developer will also raise concerns on how to implement what is technology how to maintain what the infrastructure
00:07:54.820 that's needed all the stuff and then X is tester Assessor will be some question
00:08:01.630 on whether this feature is feasible not really feasible how to test it what H
00:08:09.310 guess cases that is not being considered so people in charge of defining the
00:08:17.050 requirements which is the product we'll sit down with all these programmers and also testers to discuss
00:08:26.830 the feature to be implemented and then they come up with examples on how the software should behave and write down as
00:08:33.669 a cucumber scenario so during this phase
00:08:39.910 the workshop the most commonly used practice is example mapping so example
00:08:48.610 mapping will took like 35 minutes and then there's different colors the first
00:08:54.160 colors yellow will show the story and then rules example and also if you have
00:09:01.210 questions during the example mapping you can put on the right side so you don't
00:09:07.720 forget about it because questions are important and when you design certain feature you have question before better
00:09:13.720 about it then that's a bad thing so remember you have questions you put on the right side so you need to settle it
00:09:19.570 and then this will help you to zoom in and focus on the smallest piece of
00:09:25.750 behavior inside sorry and also tease
00:09:30.790 apart the rules find the core of the behavior that you want and defer the
00:09:35.800 rest until later means you don't want your story to be too big you'd want to implement everything in one shot you
00:09:42.280 want to break down in smaller pieces so if you find your stories to be you can break it down even smaller it's more
00:09:49.000 easier that way and with this scrutiny example and the mapping act as a filter
00:09:56.590 so it prevents a fad story from getting through a sprint and exploit during last
00:10:02.830 minute you don't want that so here are the comparison of scenario
00:10:09.860 just now we mentioned about cucumber scenarios so a scenario is an example of
00:10:15.980 the system behavior from one or more user perspective so this see now is example from the user
00:10:22.579 side okay except in test sorry acceptance criteria accepting criterias
00:10:28.790 are a set of rules which covers aspect of the system behavior and from wishing scenarios can be derived so accepting
00:10:36.259 test is a set of rules from the system so you can give example with scenario
00:10:42.910 for your different criteria that's the difference when it's rules or exact
00:10:48.110 example okay during workshop you will need to make a
00:10:54.649 decision in the end right so you need voting so commonly used voting is rumen
00:11:00.079 voting which you have the light button or the lights thumbs up and thumbs up
00:11:05.929 means I support the proposal sideways sideways means I go along with the wheel
00:11:14.299 of the group means of no go man and either agree or disagree I'll go with
00:11:19.459 the group and then thumbs down I don't agree and I would like to speak so if you have a mixing area where you
00:11:28.189 have a thumbs down and O's some thumbs up you need to further discuss on what can
00:11:34.850 be explained or clarify so that everyone
00:11:39.980 reaches the common consensus so if you still have it comes down make that
00:11:44.989 resolve so everyone should either have a thumbs up or sideways to reach a
00:11:50.149 consensus okay the second activities of the
00:11:55.700 specification by example is outside in development by programmers so let's
00:12:01.010 stick this example so you have Google you want to search something you search
00:12:06.020 for timer for like one hour it should show something like that so for this
00:12:14.630 activities you start with the functionality that closest to the user the user interface which is on the
00:12:21.140 outside of the system so you focus on what is closest to the user rather than directly go to the system itself and you
00:12:28.340 gradually work towards the guts of the system business logic persistence messaging and so on as they discover
00:12:36.410 more what's to be implemented so if you look at the user point of view you
00:12:43.370 understand more how user works in your features rather than directly jump into doing the stopwatch logic doesn't make
00:12:50.450 sense like with it really use that so
00:12:56.470 now we are going for cucumber so that's the picture when my team first which
00:13:04.090 given a task on cucumber it's very scary right so yeah cucumber is a behavior driven
00:13:11.330 development it's um the string of cucumber and it's written in Ruby a and
00:13:18.610 uses gherkin is the SL language the
00:13:23.630 domain language for like Ruby Ruby cucumber so you need to write in certain
00:13:28.910 language in order to parse commonly used for design documentation and regressions
00:13:37.060 kay so a note for everyone
00:13:42.960 cucumber is not a testing tool so if you want to use cucumber as testing tool is
00:13:48.450 not so this is why so the creator of cucumber says that if you think you can
00:13:55.590 brace the testing tool please read on because you are wrong cucumber was born out of frustration with ambiguous requirements and
00:14:02.370 misunderstanding between people who ordered the software and those who
00:14:07.470 deliver it because there's a miscommunication between the requirements and the person who designed
00:14:13.290 it that's cucumber came into place it's not a testing tool testing tool is to test
00:14:18.330 whatever you write or before you write in the system way this is from end to
00:14:24.030 end starting from user until the system so gherkin let's talk about gherkin it
00:14:34.440 also mean pickle cucumber those you found in burgers but it's not that it's
00:14:40.320 a business readable language is in pure English or any language in a smoke like
00:14:47.400 French Malay Chinese you can do whatever language you want and this is
00:14:54.720 domain-specific languages DSL so they have certain format to do that it's business readable and somewhat
00:15:02.210 conversational and very specific logic it's help you do it Express features in
00:15:09.750 natural language it uses given when and then so just like experiment where you
00:15:17.430 prepare you execute and you observe all very fine it's available in 60 languages
00:15:24.540 so whatever language that you use can use number whoever designed the feature
00:15:31.290 whoever your program manager is they can write cucumber so this is a Malay so you
00:15:40.530 can write actually write a Malay cucumber scenario and it works
00:15:47.610 later we'll get to this in demo okay
00:15:52.770 okay let me explain about a gherkin in the feature files so all cucumber
00:15:58.660 scenario end up with not feature extension and then so use the example
00:16:04.090 just now the Google search you have feature timer countdown in such result so this is a broad explanation on what
00:16:13.150 the feature is about and then the scenario is the example that you want to try so it's user able to see the timer
00:16:19.300 when switching it and then given that user Adam open the website Google when
00:16:26.560 he types timer for one hour then he presses the button search then he able to see a timer and that means counting
00:16:34.330 now from one hour so the green color that face feature so what is the feature
00:16:39.580 feature is a bigger picture of what is the feature this scenario is the test
00:16:47.080 case or behavior I use use user experience so is you look at it as a
00:16:56.110 user site of using your feature given so
00:17:02.050 it's a set up precondition when it's action and then then is to verify the
00:17:11.170 outcome okay so we extend we expand a
00:17:17.410 feature phone now we have backgrounds so background we have like given a user Adam when he opens the Chrome browser
00:17:23.290 then he able to see the search bar what does a background in a cucumber wow this background is to set up States
00:17:33.010 and condition before running any scenarios and it runs as a before hook
00:17:38.200 so for every single scenario you have a background we run first so you can write
00:17:43.720 other scenarios it will still run the background so you can write some
00:17:49.140 preconditions before example your example or the scenario runs
00:17:54.890 okay so the recolor one you can see given a username Adam this will need a
00:18:03.230 step definition to actually use it so from here you can see given a entity
00:18:09.380 name do entity name so you extract the values of entity a name you load from a
00:18:16.760 fixtures and then you will see whether the features is already exist if it's
00:18:22.250 not exist you create the entity so you need to do some process or Ruby
00:18:31.340 functions to make sure all your entities are well setup and this is called step
00:18:38.540 definition okay okay additional glossary
00:18:45.410 so we all have hooks just now I mentioned about before hooks in cucumber we have before and after hooks this is
00:18:52.610 part of the configuration so if you see after cucumber so you can help you come
00:18:58.970 but you quit if you find any errors you can set up so it won't continue to run
00:19:05.630 if you set the configuration to tool and then it'll also allows tag hooks so if
00:19:13.880 you use add something this is called attack so you can run impact also you can use wherever this hook is been
00:19:20.990 identified do certain stuff so this is also part of the configuration remember
00:19:27.370 maintainable cucumber first you need a feature file next you have a step
00:19:34.910 definition and then you have help across helper folder so this tree are the main
00:19:42.260 components to write cucumber so you need a feature of our step definition to help
00:19:48.350 us and then features and hooks or configuration those are optional this is
00:19:55.070 to make sure that you all have your cucumber more feature more running more
00:20:02.450 smoothly and do some tricks on the scenario so
00:20:07.910 let's see whether I can get something
00:20:15.120 it's not
00:20:21.119 right here so need to show you something on the comer
00:20:36.250 so how we used to compare in our normal
00:20:42.870 book is
00:20:56.720 you
00:21:06.060 okay hmm so you can see our structures
00:21:11.120 from here we have features and then inside features we'll have like step
00:21:16.980 definition and support supports is all the features and helper class and also some configuration this is how we set up
00:21:25.550 for Humber let's go back to slides
00:21:32.100 okay so that's one conference called Chuck in UK where it talks about BDD and
00:21:41.039 also agile ramen in cucumber so that's one saying that you need to keep your
00:21:47.880 step definition clean so you can use help class and variables to prevent you
00:21:55.110 from calling a step and another step so you have like creating a web block then
00:22:02.940 you have when I create a web block you will call create a web block step you
00:22:08.730 don't do that because you deprecates very soon this practice will couple all your step
00:22:15.090 definition together which will make your dependency very tightly coupled when
00:22:20.400 something changed you'll break a lot of stuff so we advise that people to use classes to replace step calling steps so
00:22:28.770 that's the link for the come the for the conference so how we make use of
00:22:34.710 cucumber in our company so first we drop a user sorry
00:22:40.159 according to Turkey that's our product manager doing that and then we write
00:22:48.500 number scenarios before and during development so it's like TDD we write
00:22:54.720 the scenario first run it and make sure everything is in place and it fails and
00:23:01.799 then we create the software and also build the software to make the test pass
00:23:10.070 and also this is the thing run cucumber against your development branch and also
00:23:15.330 on in build servers so when we push to like our build servers Jenkins we will
00:23:20.940 run a process of cucumber it will validate all our software whether it's
00:23:28.200 it breaks or there's any changes in behavior so that is serving as a regression so we
00:23:38.100 will know whether our new features will break the current existing behavior so
00:23:47.690 let's talk about my experience with cucumber so that's good things and bad things about cucumber when you work on
00:23:54.990 it so the bad things the Convention and
00:24:00.000 also maintenance it's very hard to set a tone in writing a cucumber because you
00:24:06.750 need to write in a certain way so that everyone can on board easily and also
00:24:12.030 people are like in the future you're writing arrows much more easier so let's
00:24:19.140 take a sample of what we have now okay
00:24:25.710 so you can see this scenario is very nicely formatted it's not one or two
00:24:32.250 days work to set this convention you need to know what you're doing you need
00:24:37.500 to know how to make it modular so if you write like just normal English you will
00:24:44.670 reach these states because every person writes sentences are different you don't
00:24:52.260 want to step support all those cut type of ways of writing English you'll be
00:24:58.470 held in writing your step definition and then this is also a pin point to
00:25:05.160 maintain a cucumber because every single time a new feature come up there's a new
00:25:10.590 sentence a new type of behavior that want to support so it's kind of painful
00:25:17.280 to do that so let's move on the good
00:25:23.400 thing is about cucumber documentation and regression so do you like to update
00:25:30.420 your documentation every single time you change something like everywhere if you
00:25:36.480 have written one of the stuff and then you have version 2 version fee
00:25:41.929 or you make a small tweak in certain component and it changes other stuff do you want to update all the document that
00:25:48.440 relates to it or you just want a single place of truth cucumber so that's what
00:25:55.159 we see as a very good in very good method to do that so as business people
00:26:03.529 don't have to ask us what is the behavior offices and stuff just read cucumber versus English you understand
00:26:09.889 English it's easier don't have to ask everyone to verify certain stuff and
00:26:15.259 also regression so in the future if you add features you make sure existing stuff doesn't break this stuff as
00:26:22.240 regression checks so why should you use it when you bring some new features is
00:26:30.409 very cheap right in English in gherkin rather than writing a code base and then
00:26:37.759 throwing out you just you need to understand what you are trying to build so write in English in gherkin format
00:26:46.090 and if you are hitting constant problem and configuring drama across teams so
00:26:52.369 you have like a designer team then they pass to a programmers then they pass the designer the designer finally the
00:26:58.940 programmer this is not what this word meant because there's no clear communication you just the product
00:27:05.779 designer just through the docs to you and then programmer things that's what it means there's no communication
00:27:12.289 there's no coherence on understanding the single notation so you want to come
00:27:19.580 back to do that you need a single point of truth it's very important and you don't to update
00:27:26.539 documentation when all features being changed so why do you company probably
00:27:32.690 not for you if you are building a features that very very clear
00:27:38.240 instructions you don't need to remember is a lot of process designing feature
00:27:43.369 that doesn't involve everyone so you only involve one parties then maybe not
00:27:48.830 suitable for YouTube or you just want a testing framework this again this is not a testing
00:27:54.600 framework if you want a testing framework go for capybara or r-spec that's more the or suitable framework
00:28:03.630 for you and we are moving some of our cucumbers in area into our spec because we think that we are more comfortable in
00:28:11.840 doing it in r-spec but we still maintain some of the stuff in the cucumber
00:28:17.330 company does uses cucumber so we have platform paper and also Groupon to
00:28:24.890 confess so this is a conference of BDD
00:28:31.140 it's in UK so you can go to that link if
00:28:36.510 you want to know more and this are the reference that you can get if you want
00:28:43.200 to know more about cucumber is in github is open source and let's see yeah
00:28:51.510 granny so the slides will be in here and I found that a lot of people - shows
00:28:57.270 allow cat pictures so we have our office cats do have a Facebook page
00:29:06.850 our employees do that so we have yeah we have a page for them so if you want to
00:29:13.450 go to dig in you know it's actually our office cat yeah so let's see whether we
00:29:22.210 can do a quick demo just I'm promise ah lights is bad can you see the orange the
00:29:31.000 yellow color links
00:29:46.320 they better know okay so what I'm trying to show here is running cucumber in
00:29:53.789 Malay language because as I mentioned right you can use sixty language to write your cucumber scenarios so this is
00:30:01.889 the Malay so to run it you just type cucumber and then your feature name and
00:30:09.120 then just run so it says that let's see make it bigger this is that your step
00:30:19.350 definition haven't been implemented so the first time you run you write your
00:30:24.450 cucumber scenario you get this you say that you're setting a feature is not implemented yet so let's go to the step
00:30:31.769 definition
00:30:37.590 kay well this was
00:30:46.960 okay so you just copy everything in and
00:30:53.830 comment this out
00:31:14.710 and then you try to run it again
00:31:27.250 and again so yeah you can see that after you copy to step definition you will say
00:31:33.970 pending because you they will have a pending were in comments here you can
00:31:40.480 see there's a pending here to prevent you from not writing it if you just
00:31:46.060 plainly copy it won't pass thought minnows maximize the
00:31:58.280 so if we do this we just comment out the
00:32:03.980 pending because you for here you should write your cucumber helper class and
00:32:11.170 call in your helper class to do stuff for you
00:32:21.870 hmm whew
00:32:29.190 all of them in all like
00:32:36.929 so now yeah it passes so you need to write certain stuff in the step
00:32:42.550 definition in order to pass so this is how it works and then the color is not
00:32:52.600 there so you can see it runs of each of us at the step definition what's the line number is running so
00:32:58.000 this will help you also to understand what you are doing okay that's it for me
00:33:03.750 any question all right thank you so much great thank you for speaking about this
00:33:14.470 thing still won't do it joke all right I did questions on testing strategies BDD
00:33:21.640 TDD whatever you'd like to ask sure great
00:33:31.520 hello oh yeah yeah so because cucumber is used mostly as a documentation tool
00:33:37.140 and a regression - not as a testing framework so how it is possible to share
00:33:44.130 the documentation that you write using cucumber with non-programmer people
00:33:49.770 because normally I see it's inside the code base itself so it could be not
00:33:55.650 accessible so do you have any idea how we can do that so cucumber meant for a
00:34:02.040 single point of truth so yes it's correct it will be in a git
00:34:08.040 repository so to allow people to see it we will need to give access to the
00:34:15.150 business people and we introduce how to write gherkin for them so they can write
00:34:22.410 on the Google Doc for us our product manager will write on the Google Doc and then we will translate into our gherkin
00:34:31.710 format because we want to make it maintainable whatever product manager
00:34:37.110 will do you place some pictures on the wireframe so we need to translate it so
00:34:43.590 this extra boat for us but you will find a way to a middle ground where you can
00:34:49.800 work with a product manager to find a way where it works best for a team so different teams have different needs
00:34:55.670 it's just need to find a way to work around that okay thank you so there's no
00:35:01.980 way to visualize it at all from Y no no that's no visualise it's a project
00:35:07.650 available for anybody any other questions
00:35:18.040 so my program manager previously is a like our part of our programmers
00:35:23.900 actually and then he he doesn't do much development after he moved up to
00:35:30.890 remeasure so um to make product manager understand gherkin is like doing act
00:35:37.660 experiments so you have a three key words given when and then so ask them to
00:35:44.180 follow these three rules given that some condition when you do an action then
00:35:51.740 what you should see so it's easier for them to understand if you have like these three words and using these three
00:35:58.400 words you can translate into scenario it's very sufficient for that already
00:36:06.010 for now no we just use it plainly right yeah any last questions
00:36:16.650 nope never tied alex is shaking he says I'm alright there are no questions thank
GLZ
Gooi Liang Zheng
1 talk
Explore all talks recorded at RubyConf MY 2017
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