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A Practical Advice on Rejecting Gherkin for Test Automation

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

Zhimin Zhan

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:

How to avoid using Gherkin in your project?

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Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Excellent article again Zhimin.

Based on my own experience I completely agree with every word in this article.

I know one situation where Gherkin in testing works like a charm.

It is Karate DSL for API testing.

Karate DSL is a BDD framework in…

2

I am sorry this is off topic. I was scanning through your past articles looking for comments on Robot Framework -- didn't any. May I have your thoughts on it?
I will be starting a test automation project soon. The target system is an e-commerce site…