Acceptance Testing – Cucumber? Specflow? Cuke4Nuke

I have been pretty much dormant on this blog due to my part time MBA coupled with a some tight deadlines at work. And to get me back into the blog bandwagon I just thought I will do this small pet project of mine outside work for which I have been exploring the acceptance testing tool to use infact functional test tool which will allow me to translate my acceptance criteria on stories to tests from plain english.

I found something about Specflow on a few blogs,it is a set of libraries to write specifications using Gherkin. You can check the screencast here or read this post from Ryan Lanciaux. SpecFlow can use either NUnit or MsTest as the engine. You could use specflow and drive WATIN.

Being a .Net developer I am quite inclined to use Specflow and Watin after having had a look at it mainly because i dont need to learn a new language and i can use my c# knowledge to write tests, However previous experience with WATIN a couple of years was not great and it always seemed be behind some of the things you could do with WATIR, hopefully this has changed now, In my current job we use Cucumber + Watir to write acceptance tests and we use Ruby, Although I found it a bit steep on the learning curve initially and mainly because i havent worked in anything but .Net. Now after a couple of weeks into it I am beginning to think if this is may be the right choice, for e.g I am not even a novice in Ruby but RubyMine from JetBrains makes it easy when you are a new bee.

I still didnt want to give up exploring a .Net + cucumber combination and my search led me to this article by Richard Lawrence in his blog which compares the pros and cons of Watir and Watin.. go to . Interestingly Richard and a group of other people started driving this project called Cuke4Nuke sometime ago now which should allow us to write tests in C# for cucumber, That sounds great to me, because I am not looking at any advanced usage of cucumber, i guess my needs are pretty basic for now, I have not used it yet but all i can say at the moment is having looked at the screen cast and the background the creators of the project have given it quite a bit of thought on performance (if you read the blog you will find that they did explore using Iron Python over WATIN which was horribly slow).

A couple of months ago they released 0.3 which supports almost everything you can do with Cucumber in Ruby or Java, making C# a first class language for Cucumber. (The only missing features are small things like tags on Before and After hooks and a richer Table object.)

To install and have a play with this go to the Cuke4Nuke Wiki at http://wiki.github.com/richardlawrence/Cuke4Nuke/

Screen Cast on Cuke4Nuke and WATIN

http://www.richardlawrence.info/2009/12/03/screencast-testing-web-applications-in-net-with-cuke4nuke-and-watin/

I am going to give this a go for a spike on my new project so lets see how this goes :).