Going where no QA has gone before!

2017-04-18 This post is over 2 years old

As a developer having QA you can rely on is great! They are welcome friends helping us cultivate our precious software. But there are dark places which even a QA cannot shine a light. When your software has no interface, what can a QA do, but wish you luck? But what if there was a way for QAs to interact with otherwise UI-less software? Enter Cucumber, a tool that allows QA to shine a light in dark places. I rediscovered Cucumber, while researching test automation frameworks. Cucumber is a framework for Behavioral Driven Development. After experimenting for a time, I realized Cucumber opens a whole realm of possibilities. Cucumber encourages the expression of program actions in the human tongue. With a proper translation mechanism, Cucumber could act as a mediator between QA and the UI-less software.  Cucumber translates the human tongue into functions through the Gherkin language. For example, a tester would define a test case like this:

Scenario: Messages are saved until the consumer arrives Given the queues are empty And I publish a message to the queue with ‘SomeDetails’ When Alice subscribes to the queue Then Alice should receive a message with ‘SomeDetails’

It is fairly easy to understand the behavior that is being described in this scenario. Cucumber ties the keywords Given, When, and Then to functions which execute the described action using a Regex Match string. This can include free-hand parameters such as ‘SomeDetails’.  Properly designed, the Givens and Whens can be setup to be repeatable and re-compose-able. Doing so allows the QA to describe more complex scenarios with different combinations of the same simple behaviors. As a result, once the initial steps are available, a QA could test to their hearts content with little developer support. Cucumber improves the documentation of a product. Test document expected behaviors in a common tongue. This makes them available to all parts of the company. But great care must be taken to ensure that the compose-able parts function precisely as described and without side-effects. Imperfections in the design or the aforementioned side-effects will destroy test-validity and erode trust in the test cases written using Cucumber. Cucumber was designed to improve TDD, enabling members of a team to describe the function of a program in a human tongue. This same feature creates a tool for empowering QA. Given careful planning and design, you can compose a terse but flexible set of instructions. These allow a QA to test projects they could never touch before! By blending the skills of a developer and a QA, we can reap the best of all our talents. All it takes is an investment to allow our friend in QA to come with us!