A Practical Advice on Rejecting Gherkin for Test Automation

Prevent this recipe for failures in E2E test automation; Prevent embarrassment.

Gherkin BDD frameworks (such as Cucumber, SpecFlow, JBehave, Concordian and Gauge) are often used in test automation, which is wrong!

The fact: few engineers have seen, let alone implemented, a successful Automated E2E regression testing. Check out the AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading.

Gherkin is a wrong choice for Test Automation

Don’t just take my word for it. Have a look at the following quotes from Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of Cucumber.

“Using UI testing tools together with Cucumber? Please don’t — or at least do it very sparingly.” (link)

“If all you need is a testing tool for driving a mouse and a keyboard, don’t use Cucumber. ” (link)

For more, check out my articles:

• BDD Clarified: BDD ≠ “Given-When-Then” (Gherkin)
• Why Gherkin (Cucumber, SpecFlow,…) Always Failed with UI Test Automation?

How to avoid using Gherkin in your project?