Jeff Shell argues that Cucumber and by inference BDD frameworks add needless complexity to a project;
One of my main issues with RSpec and Cucumber as I've seen them in the wild is that there seems to be very few tests, and they're not terribly useful. They seem to be repeats of the classic "baby's first use case", which is "user logs in". Maybe their usage outside of the open-source world is different, but the few projects I've seen which use them have very few test cases that always has me going "that's it? you think you're tested?"
Our QA department is implementing the automation of testing with Cucumber. Personally I like the non-ambiguous nature
of BDD's Given, When, Then. We use it in our unit tests and functional tests as well as the BDD naming of tests. I think it works well.
All our functional tests are in java. The front-end group uses selenium and the middleware group uses junit for our functional tests. The middleware group - ie us - has hooked the functional tests into continuous integration and subsets of them now run every hour and a larger group nightly.
Our front-end engineering is now in java, and our middleware is all j2ee based. The remaining .net and php applications are being phased out with java based systems and frameworks. This is a good thing as now an engineer can be thrown anywhere in the stack and be able to debug or produce code quickly. Currently, going into the .net systems and php batch jobs is a bit of a nightmare.
QA is using cucumber but with JRuby. I suspect that they will have issues getting past the existing tests that engineering has written for them. This isn't a knock on QA. But a reality that writing software code is hard, good engineering is even harder and maintainable code bases are even harder still. Engineers with ten years experience are often no good at it, QA with some scripting knowledge is facing a tough task.
I have argued that engineers should lead these kinds of programs. It is just the state of modern technology that due to automation everything is now an engineering issue. Engineers are the best at writing code which means that are often the best ones to automate entire processes - including quality testing.
Our engineering group has already done all the quality testing automation. The front-end group with the selenium test which cover all their user stories and any bugs that have appeared. Same with middleware; we have functional tests for all out user stories and bugs.
Not only does that exist now, it is running hourly and nightly to prove that it is not being broken. This is in addition to a 1000+ unit tests on the middleware that are run with every check in.
I suspect that Cucumber will be dropped. Not because of BDD or Cucumber itself; but because doing engineering work - of which automated testing is an engineering issue - is hard work to get right even when you have been doing it for a long time.
I think the bench marks for quality will be the 700+ existing functional tests that have be written and are constantly in use by engineering, QA and the continuous integration process. They are there already and cover existing functionality. It is easier to re-use existing than to rewrite everything from scratch.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
