The Cucumber Book, Second Edition (PragProg)

Express your customers’ wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. Feed those examples into Cucumber and let it guide your development. Build just the right code to keep your customers happy. You can use Cucumber to test almost any system or any platform.

Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy, with Steve Tooke

Edited by Jacquelyn Carter @jkcarter

Express your customers’ wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. Feed those examples into Cucumber and let it guide your development. Build just the right code to keep your customers happy. You can use Cucumber to test almost any system or any platform.

Get started by using the core features of Cucumber and working with Cucumber’s Gherkin DSL to describe—in plain language—the behavior your customers want from the system. Then write Ruby code that interprets those plain-language specifications and checks them against your application. Next, consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained with a worked example, where you’ll learn more advanced Cucumber techniques, test asynchronous systems, and test systems that use a database. Recipes highlight some of the most difficult and commonly seen situations the authors have helped teams solve. With these patterns and techniques, test Ajax-heavy web applications with Capybara and Selenium, REST web services, Ruby on Rails applications, command-line applications, legacy applications, and more.

Written by the creator of Cucumber and the co-founders of Cucumber Ltd., this authoritative guide will give you and your team all the knowledge you need to start using Cucumber with confidence.


“Few tools have managed to bridge the developer-customer divide as well as Cucumber has. Cucumber is not a tool for testing applications. Cucumber is a philosophy for communicating requirements. This book brings that philosophy to life.”

–Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)


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