Matt Wynne on BDD

02 March 2012

A transcribed snippet from a video of Matt Wynne’s talk on BDD, at the Agile Testing and BDD Exchange 2011 (~46 minutes in): > For maintainability’s sake and for the sake of enabling you to write the scenarios in your domain’s language, keep the step definitions really, really short and build a library of supporting code that can talk to your application so your step definitions become really simple; they just become really light-weight mappings between the way the business facing features describe what the test should do and code that can make that happen. Keeping Cucumber step definitions simple and domain focused was one of the problems we tried to address with our Cucumber extension, CukeSalad, which makes it possible to never touch a step definition at all.

In addition to fewer step definitions, with CukeSalad the Goals, Tasks, Actions metaphor helps focus attention on the domain and its capability, rather than the implementation and its features.