Hi Chris,
On 16 Jul 2009, at 04:14, Chris Sund wrote:
Can someone clarify in "simple" terms the relationship between rspec
and cucumber.
Very short answer:
RSpec is for specifying the behaviour of individual pieces of your
application, ideally in isolation from all of the other pieces. The
mocking framework allows you to write specs for each separate piece
(e.g. each class) in a way that doesn't depend on any of the other
pieces: "Assuming that pieces A and B and C behave in the way they're
supposed to, piece D should behave like this...". This gives you a way
to drive the actual implementation of your application in detail, at
the level of individual methods doing simple jobs.
Cucumber is for specifying/testing the overall behaviour of your
application. Whereas RSpec exercises each individual piece in
isolation, Cucumber exercises the interactions between all of the
pieces, and allows you to check what happens when several such
interactions happen in a particular order (e.g. a user playing a
complete game of Codebreaker, or going through the complete checkout/
payment process in a web application). Whereas RSpec examples are very
fine-grained and implementation-focused, Cucumber features are meant
to be broad and high-level in a way that makes them meaningful to
actual users of the application (or the customers who are asking for
it to be built) rather than just programmers.
One way of thinking about this is that your specs make all sorts of
assumptions about how the rest of the system is meant to behave, and
Cucumber is a way of actually checking those assumptions by running
the system as a whole.
Cheers,
-Tom
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