Writing Great Specifications

Chapter 4. The basics of scenario outlines

This chapter covers

• Understanding scenario outlines versus scenarios
• Removing redundancies in scenarios with DRY
• Comparing advantages and disadvantages of scenario outlines
• Maintaining scenario outlines over time

Chapters 2 and 3 explored the art of writing scenarios. You learned several techniques that make creating new scenarios easy and fun. And that’s fantastic! After all, the gentle learning curve is what makes Gherkin so beginner-friendly. But this simplicity is also what makes creating a stable specification suite difficult from a long-term perspective. Gherkin is almost too easy to write, so it’s also easy to pick up bad habits.

While writing this chapter, I looked at several of my first feature ...