Cucumber Recipes: Automate Anything with BDD Tools and Techniques

You can test just about anything with Cucumber. We certainly have, and in Cucumber Recipes we'll show you how to apply our hard-won field experience to your own projects. Once you've mastered the basics, this book will show you how to get the most out of Cucumber--from specific situations to advanced test-writing advice. With over forty practical recipes, you'll test desktop, web, mobile, and server applications across a variety of platforms. This book gives you tools that you can use today to automate any system that you encounter, and do it well.

The Cucumber Book showed you how your team can work together to write executable specifications--documents that tell a clear story and also happen to be working test code. We'll arm you with ready-rolled solutions to real-world problems: your tests will run faster, read more clearly, and work in any environment.

Our first tips will help you fit Cucumber into your workflow. Powerful filters will tame tables full of test data, transforming them into the format your application needs. Custom output formatters will generate reports for any occasion. Continuous Integration servers will run your Cucumber tests every time the code changes. Next, you'll find recipes tailored to the platform you're running on. Ever wanted to know how to test a Grails app from Cucumber? Need to put a Windows program through its paces? How about a mobile app running on Android or iOS? We'll show you how to do all of these.

Throughout the book, you'll see how to make Cucumber sing as you interoperate with different platforms, languages, and environments. From embedded circuits to Python and PHP web apps, Cucumber has something for you.

What You Need:

You'll need basic working knowledge of Cucumber and Ruby. Individual recipes may have additional requirements; for example, a recipe on Windows automation might pull in an open source GUI driver.

We've written the recipes for compatibility with Ruby 1.9.3 and 1.8.7, plus Cucumber 1.1.4. Other versions may work as well, but these are the ones we test with.

*Ian Dees* was first bitten by the programming bug in 1986 on a Timex Sinclair 1000, and has been having a blast in his software apprenticeship ever since. By day, Ian slings code, tests, and puns at a Portland-area test equipment manufacturer. By night, he converts espresso into programming books, including Scripted GUI Testing With Ruby and Using JRuby.

Matt Wynne is a leading BDD practitioner, a member of the Cucumber core team, and a programmer, coach, trainer, and popular international speaker. Alongside Aslak Hellesøy and Julien Biezemans, Matt is co-founder of Cucumber Ltd., the company behind Cucumber. Matt tweets from @mattwynne and @cucumberbdd.

Aslak Hellesoy is the creator of Cucumber. During his career Aslak has worked with both small and large organizations in industries such as telecom, trading, insurance, car manufacturing, education, and government. Aslak is co-founder of Cucumber Ltd, the company behind Cucumber. He tweets from @aslak_hellesoy and @cucumberbdd.