Rails 5 Test Prescriptions

Is Cucumber Worth It?

That depends on what “it” is. Cucumber is a very helpful acceptance-test framework, provided your expectations of it are reasonable. It’s a lousy unit-test framework, and if you try to use it for unit testing you’ll hate it and possibly stop eating salads to avoid cucumbers, which is bad for your health.

I use Cucumber for the relatively minimal goals of being able to write my integration tests at the level of user behavior and being able to easily separate my slower integration tests from my faster unit tests. For those things, it works great.

You’ll sometimes hear that Cucumber allows for nondeveloper members of your team to participate in the acceptance-testing process because Cucumber is natural language–like. My experiences ...