• JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    Yes, I actually do. It’s a behavioral driven testing framework. I love the idea of it but hate working with it because everyone uses it improperly.

    What the steps in a scenario should look like:

    Given a user has a bank accout
And the account has a balance of $10
When the user attempts to withdraw $20
Then the transaction should fail

    How everyone I’ve worked with uses it:

    Given the system is setup
Given the user TESTUSER1
Given load TESTDATA1
When the user sends a request
    ACTION | AMOUNT
    WITHDRAW | 20.0
The the response should be 400
    STATUS | MESSAGE
    Failure | Not enough funds
      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        On that same page is Gherkin which is what both examples are. (I may have gotten the syntax slightly wrong.) Cucumber uses Gherkin. I forget which is which exactly. Maybe Cucumber is the code that reads Gherkin and executes step definitions.

        For whatever reason, people try to make a small number of extremely flexible step definitions which leads to scenarios that don’t actually read as business requirements. (Which is the entire point in the first place.)

        Given a user has a bank accout
And the account has a balance of $10
When the user attempts to withdraw $20
Then the transaction should fail
And the account should have a balance of $20

Given a user has a bank accout
And the account has a balance of $10
When the user attempts to withdraw $5
Then the transaction should succeed
And the account should have a balance of $5

Given a user has a bank accout
And the account has a balance of $10
When the user attempts to deposit $5
Then the transaction should succeed
And the account should have a balance of $15

        Doing something like this is more elegant. The steps definitions would be

        • a user has a bank account performs setup tasks to load a test user into the system.
        • the account has a balance of X would either load the account with that much or just make an initial deposit.
        • the user attempts to withdraw X/the user attempts to deposit X would both perform those actions. If it’s a web API they’d be HTTP requests.
        • then the transaction should X would check HTTP status code. You could make this two separate step definitions or have logic based on the word. Two separate step definitions is probably better.
        • the account should have a balance of X checks the balance in the account.
    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      1 day ago

      Maybe that’s why I hate using it, or maybe I just hate testing frameworks that do more than run tests. Here’s what I want from a testing framework:

      • run tests in classes or modules
      • report output with some configurable name (javadoc comment, Python Docstring, etc)
      • some way to parameterize tests with different inputs
      • organized output that shows what failed
      • if it’s an integration test, keep track of failures over time

      Our QA uses cucumber and it works for them, so I only whine when I need to deal with it.

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Cucumber can do all of that. Except for failures over time but I’ve never used a framework for that. CI tools typically track that.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          19 hours ago

          Sure, and my issue isn’t that it’s capable of my requirements, but simple to use and meets those requirements. Simplicity is a quality all its own.

          JUnit provides sufficient output to meet my requirements, so why overcomplicate it w/ Cucumber? AFAIK, cucumber tests in Java output JUinit as well (at least ours does), so what value exactly is Cucumber providing?

          • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            18 hours ago

            If you don’t want the scenarios that are readable in a business requirement format then it’s not worth the trouble. I haven’t ever seen anyone use it in that way.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              17 hours ago

              Yeah, I don’t get it. The only people looking at the results are devs, so we really don’t need the business requirement text.

              I could maybe understand if product owners were creating the requirements in the feature files and devs were implementing them in the code, but that never happens. So the whole cucumber library thing we have going on just feels annoying.

              It’s not the only thing we over-engineer. We have dependency injection when we only ever have one dependency (except in tests, in which case we could just use mocking). We take microservices to the extreme (we just broke out a couple hundred lines of code from a few thosand lines of code service). Our test code is unnecessarily reusable (test code is one place where DRY doesn’t really need to apply). And so on. This one in particular is especially annoying because it makes it harder to find the code without providing much benefit.

              Our QAs seem to like it, so whatever. I’ll still complain though.

      • thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.org
        1·
        1 day ago

        I think there’s one question you should answer in order to fully describe your “testing framework”: is it being used for “end to end tests” or “integration tests” or “unit tests”? https://k-hartanto.medium.com/testing-pyramid-and-testing-ice-cream-cone-what-is-the-difference-6ddde3876c20

        For unit tests, something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JUnit is useful. For testing a program after it’s deployed, something like https://jbehave.org/reference/stable/story-syntax.html is useful. You get different information about your program from each type of testing, and one type can detect issues even if the other didn’t, so doing both is useful.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          20 hours ago

          These are for a mix of end to end and integration tests.

          I mostly do unit tests as a dev, so our tests are simple enough that they don’t benefit from more structure than being grouped by suite. E.g.:

          • AuthService
            • valid user creds can login
            • invalid user creds cannot login
            • non-existent user gets same error as wrong creds
          • UserSettingsService
            • can change language
            • cannot set empty password

          These don’t have long flows, so there’s no benefit to documenting steps (they usually have one step).

          My complaint about cucumber/gherkin isn’t with documenting steps, it’s with managing them in separate files. We have a Service.feature file that documents the scenario and the ServiceTest.java that documents the steps. I don’t see the point in having those be separate files, especially since the only people defining inputs and scenarios are the devs (dedicated QA in our case). We occasionally have our BE devs help write a few tests, and every time it’s a struggle for them to figure out where everything is. It just feels over-engineered.

          In unit tests, we parameterize our tests just like with cucumber, we just do so in the code. E.g. in Python:

          @parameterized.expand([(1, 2), (2, 4)])
def test_duplicate(num, exp):
    res = dup(num)
    assert res == exp

          I would much prefer something like that in our end to end and integration tests.

  • moopet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    This is one of those things where if I was to say, “no, but I know celery”, people would think I was being silly.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 day ago

      Well yeah, cucumber is a Ruby/Java/etc testing framework and celery is a Python async task queue framework. Know what job you’re applying for, silly.

      😁

    • Drewmeister@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      34·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, we use gherkin, which is a variety of cucumber. Programmers name things weird. Java is a coffee bean and C is just a letter; they’ve just gotten big enough that people recognize them now.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        C is just a letter

        It’s the successor to B, which was derived from BCPL (“Basic Combined Programming Language”)

        Incidentally, C++ is a reference to how integer values are iterated in C. And then C# is a pithy take on C++ wherein you’ve stacked two rows of plus signs on top of each other.

        There’s often some rhyme or reason to these names.

        • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 day ago

          I found this interesting, was there an A?

          Proceeds to go look it up while still hoping for your knowledge

      • Shoe@lemm.ee
        4·
        3 days ago

        Have always personally seen Gherkin being used with Cucumber, as I believe that they’re two parts of the same whole, but I’m happy to be corrected if wrong :).

        My understanding is that Gherkin is the syntax used to write the scenarios / acceptance criteria, whilst Cucumber is the tool that interprets said scenarios and executes them as automated tests.

    • JakenVeina@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      And here I thought the fact that it’s spelled “Cucumber” and not “qcmbr” was the giveaway that it’s a joke.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 days ago

      At the rate those things get spewed out, you can use pretty much any dictionary word and it’ll be the name of some kind of software tool. Probably in javascript.

  • qwestjest78@lemmy.ca
    21·
    3 days ago

    It’s a terrible time right now. I’ve applied for over 100 roles this year and only got 3 interviews. Interviews went well, but you never move on. Likely they had someone in mind for the position already.

    I think I’m close to reaching out to one of those temp agencies and try to find a year contract somewhere with the hope I end up getting a permanent offer somewhere.

    I have 10 years experience in operations and finished a BBA a year ago and it has not amounted in any new opportunities sadly.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 day ago

      I disagree. I’m a full-stack engineer, and every time I interact with our QA test suite in cucumber, I break out in hives. I hate keeping the gherkin feature file up to date with the test code, why so much complexity?

      • THCDenton@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 day ago

        Ah. Yeah to be fair I’ve only used it on personal projects. I’ve never had to use it at work. Maybe I’d change my tune after that experience

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          1 day ago

          Or maybe we just use it poorly. It doesn’t help that we use perhaps my least favorite language for testing: Java. I’ve written tons of integration tests, but we just used Python and unittest with some plugins to make output nicer, and it was pleasant enough.

      • LeninOnAPrayer@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Yeah but then they add all these new requirements to be considered “experienced”. Every company really wants you to know Cucumber++ but only to spent all your time converting old legacy Cucumber code. It’s going to be an awful job to take.

        And some of them don’t even know that CucumberScript is an entirely different language. No one would ever use CucumberScript in the Backend. It’s clearly a frontend only language. But nope. They keep trying to ask you if you have experience with Cucumber++ or CucumberScript for backend work. These recruiters have no idea what they are even asking you. You clearly should be using Eggplant. It’s the only thing that will work longterm as your backend requirements expand.