Ruby on Rails

On Aug 22, 2013, at 4:29 PM, "Jason Hsu, Android developer" <jhsu802701@gmail.com> wrote:

> So far, I've been using RSpec for testing my Rails apps simply because that's what railstutorial.org emphasizes.
>
> However, I am in the process of trying out Cucumber.  I like the fact that it's in plain English, and this is an asset for communicating with clients or other people who aren't Rubyists.  Migrating to Cucumber sounds like a good idea.
>
> I'm curious about what you prefer.  Do any of you know Cucumber well, yet still prefer RSpec?  If so, why?

Jason, I highly recommend picking up The RSpec Book, published by Pragmatic Programmers [1]. It discusses both RSpec and Cucumber: when and how to use both of them. They actually work well together, and complement each other in many ways.

For me, RSpec is the way I like to perform unit and functional testing, while Cucumber, with the Gherkin language, seems ideal for describing and testing the larger elements of the application, and are quite well suited to documenting stories as one does in Agile development, and implementing them to provide acceptance tests for features and releases. Cucumber is useful also to drive external testing of web applications via Capybara or Watir, and also for driving command line tools via Aruba.

So, for me, it's not really one *or* the other, it's both, and deciding what level of testing is needed and how easy it will be to implement that test. It is possible, I suppose, to use only one of them, but the level of detail expressible in RSpec seems to me to be ideal at the lowest level, and the large scale expressibility with Gherkin makes Cucumber more relevant to higher levels of abstraction that can be written and read by non-technical people fairly easily.

[1] http://pragprog.com/book/achbd/the-rspec-book

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