Automation Testing With Cucumber Framework in Agile Teams

Agile development is becoming more and more popular among software developers in the rapidly evolving IT industry. However, this “fad” brings along challenges for automation testers to manage and maintain test cases at par with the changing requirements. Thus, it is imperative for testing teams to wisely choose an appropriate testing methodology right from inception to implement any agile software project smoothly.

This article will cover the top features of Cucumber – a behavior-driven development (BDD) tool in detail.

Cucumber framework is an open-source software testing tool, which is written in Ruby and is created in a BDD format. This framework enables automation testers to write test cases that even a novice can understand regardless of technical knowledge. Each part of the test – the initial state, the action, and the consequent state, can be separately determined if they have passed, failed, or are still pending. 

Behavior driven development model comes along with the following advantages. 

• It facilitates writing BDD tests in an omnipotent manner. The structure of the language utilized is built around the domain model and is widely used by all team members including developers, testers, and customers. 
• It seamlessly connects the technical and non-technical members of a software team. 
• With Behavior Driven Development models, acceptance tests can execute automatically.

Find below the top features of Cucumber and expand your knowledge base. 

Cucumber and Enhanced Communication

Automation Testing with TestNG may be tough for most testers and Business Analysts to catch up. Additionally, it is not possible to use this test again for Acceptance Testing. As a consequence, TestNG can not be considered a suitable method for Automation Testing. 

Instead, enterprises create the automation tests using Cucumber, which all the members of the software project team can easily make out. Communication is imperative for an agile team. Very often team of developers and testers discuss and debate to figure out what the correct behavior of a feature is. By using cucumber framework, developers can develop the exact feature specification for testing. Cucumber is an extremely powerful tool, as it can assist in lowering the risk of misunderstanding as well as a communication breakdown.

All Testers can take part in Automation Testing

Cucumber not only helps to improve communication between the members of the testing team but also helps them to leverage their skills efficiently. The expertise gap always exists in every organization. For instance, some testers would have great technical expertise while others would lag. Cucumber framework bridges this gap and irrespective of the skill levels of testers it makes testers participate in the process of performing automation tests. 

Cucumber assists in running test scenarios mentioned in a plain text file using business knowledge. Hence, the perception of the one who crafts the test might influence test scenarios, further leading to the risk of misunderstanding. Testers should present the test scenarios clearly and their implementation should perform accurately for each step. 

Cucumber as an Automated Testing Tool

Product Managers generally carry out the acceptance test to ensure that the development team has built the mandatory features. General activity in this testing stage is verifying the system against the original requirements with specific, accurate data from production. Cucumber framework, not only follows the requirements but also enables product Managers to adjust test data quickly. 

Before getting started with Cucumber, the team of testers needs to keep in mind the following points. 

• They should consider automation tests as essential as real projects. 
• Consider an appropriate editor tool that would help in debugging and editing feature files in standard text format. 
• Make feature files an actual “communication” layer where you can store received data and format it. 

Cucumber is one of the most powerful testing tools. It offers testers a real-time communication layer on top of a robust testing framework. This tool can run automation tests from backend to frontend. Additionally, the Cucumber framework creates deep connections among members of the automation testing team, which we hardly find in other frameworks. With many years of experience in automation testing, I recommend you choose Copperchips for agile development. This decision of enterprises will enable them to reduce efforts to execute regression tests.