Cucumber

Acceptance testing vs unit test

It’s sometimes said that unit tests ensure you build the thing right, whereas acceptance tests ensure you build the right thing.

Cucumber.

The acceptance testing tool.

Source of Truth

For many teams, the Cucumber feature files become the definitive source of truth as to what the system does.

Scenarios

Scenarios are written before production code. They start their life as an executable specification. As the production code emerges, Scenarios take on a role as living documentation and automated tests.

Each Cucumber test is called a scenario, and each scenario contains steps that tell Cucumber what to do.

Gherkin

The keywords Feature, Scenario, Given, When, and Then are the structure, and everything else is documentation. The structure is called Gherkin.

Cucumber features are all about communicating with business users in their language, and it’s important that we don’t force them to sound like robots.

Structure

We start with features, which contain our scenarios and steps. The steps of our scenarios call step definitions that provide the link between the Gherkin fea- tures and the application being built.

This principle, deliberately doing the minimum useful work the tests will let us get away with, might seem lazy, but in fact it’s a discipline. It ensures that we make our tests thorough: if the test doesn’t drive us to write the right thing, then we need a better test.

Step Definitions

Step definitions are the glue that binds your Cucumber tests to the application you’re testing.

A scenario that’s been executed can end up in any of the following states:

  • Failed
  • Pending
  • Undefined
  • Skipped
  • Passed These states are designed to help indicate the progress that you make as you develop your tests.

Pending Steps

When Cucumber discovers a step definition that’s halfway through being implemented, it marks the step as pending (yellow). Again, the scenario will be stopped, and the rest of the steps will be skipped or marked as undefined.

public class Steps {
@Given("^I have deposited \\$(\\d+) in my account$")
public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) throws Throwable {
    // Write code here that turns the phrase above into concrete actions
throw new PendingException(); }
}

Step definition recap

The pending status is a bit like those under construction signs you used to see all over the Internet in the 1990s. You can use it as a temporary signpost to your teammates that you’re in the middle of working on something.

Because regular expressions can contain wildcards, this means you have the flexibility to make the Gherkin steps nice and readable, while keeping your Java step definition code clean and free of duplication. • Step definitions provide a mapping from the Gherkin scenarios’ plain- language descriptions of user actions into Java code, which simulates those actions. • Step definitions are registered with Cucumber by using @Given, @When, @Then, or one of the aliases for your spoken language. • Step definitions use regular expressions to declare the steps that they can handle. Because regular expressions can contain wildcards, one step definition can handle several different steps. • A step definition communicates its result to Cucumber by raising, or not raising, an exception.

recap

  • Readability should be your number-one goal when writing Gherkin fea- tures. Always try to sit together with a stakeholder when you write your scenarios, or at the very least pass them over for feedback once you’ve written them. Keep fine-tuning the language in your scenarios to make them more readable.
  • Use a Background to factor out repeated steps from a feature and to help tell a story.
  • Repetitive scenarios can be collapsed into a Scenario Outline.
  • Steps can be extended with multiline strings or data tables.
  • You can organize features into subfolders, like chapters in a book.
  • Tags allow you to mark up scenarios and features so you select particular sets to run or report on.

Sample

compile and run via CLI

javac -cp "jars/*" step_definitions/CheckoutSteps.java
java -cp "jars/*:." cucumber.api.cli.Main -p pretty --snippets camelcase \
                          -g step_definitions features

Line 1 compiles the CheckoutSteps class that we’ve just created. Then line 2 invokes Cucumber. There are two slight additions to Cucumber’s invocation:

  1. We’ve added the current directory “.” to the classpath.
  2. We’ve added the -g step_definitions command-line argument to tell Cucumber where to look for the step definitions that it will need to “glue” the steps in the feature file to the checkout application (which we haven’t written yet).

feature file

Feature: Is it Friday yet?
  Everybody wants to know when it's Friday

  Scenario: Sunday isn't Friday
    Given today is Sunday
    When I ask whether it's Friday yet
    Then I should be told "Nope"

The first line of this file starts with the keyword Feature: followed by a name. It’s a good idea to use a name similar to the file name.

The second line is a brief description of the feature. Cucumber does not execute this line, it’s just documentation.

The fourth line, Scenario: Sunday is not Friday is a Scenario, which is a concrete example illustrating how the software should behave.

The last three lines starting with Given, When and Then are the steps of our scenario. This is what Cucumber will execute.

Notice how we go from Scenario to Scenario Outline when we start using Examples.

Feature: Is it Friday yet?
  Everybody wants to know when it's Friday

  Scenario Outline: Today is or is not Friday
    Given today is <day>
    When I ask whether it's Friday yet
    Then I should be told <answer>

  Examples:
    | day | answer |
    | "Friday" | "TGIF" |
    | "Sunday" | "Nope" |
    | "anything else!" | "Nope" |

Scenario Outline: Withdraw fixed amount Given I have in my account When I choose to withdraw the fixed amount of Then I should receive cash And the balance of my account should be Examples: | Balance | Withdrawal | Received | Remaining | | $500 | $500 | $500 |$50 |$50 |$450 | | $100 | $100 | $400 | | $200 | $200 | $300 | We indicate placeholders within the scenario outline using angle brackets (<..>) where we want real values to be substituted. The scenario outline itself is useless without an Examples table, which lists rows of values to be substituted for each placeholder.

Doc Strings

Doc strings allow you to specify a larger piece of text than you could fit on a single line. For example, if you need to describe the precise content of an email message, you could do it like this: Scenario: Ban Unscrupulous Users When I behave unscrupulously Then I should receive an email containing: “”” Dear Sir, Your account privileges have been revoked due to your unscrupulous behavior. Sincerely, The Management “”” And my account should be locked Just like a data table, the entire string between the “”” triple quotes is attached to the step above it. The indentation of the opening “”” is not important, although common practice is to indent two spaces from the enclosing step, as we’ve shown. The indentation inside the triple quotes, however, is signifi- cant: imagine the left margin running down from the start of the first “””. If you want to include indentation within your string, you need to indent it within this margin.

TGIF

Thanks God It’s Friday

Data table

Given these Users:
| name | date of birth | 
| Michael Jackson | August 29, 1958 | 
| Elvis | January 8, 1935 | 
| John Lennon | October 9, 1940 |

That’s much clearer. The table starts on the line immediately following the step, and its cells are separated using the pipe character: |. You can line up the pipes using whitespace to make the table look tidy, although Cucumber doesn’t mind whether you do; it will strip out the values in each cell, ignoring the surrounding whitespace.

public class BoardSteps { @Given(“^a board like this:$”) public void aBoardLikeThis(DataTable arg1) throws Throwable { // Write code here that turns the phrase above into concrete actions // For automatic transformation, change DataTable to one of // List, List<List>, List<Map<K,V>> or Map<K,V>. // E,K,V must be a scalar (String, Integer, Date, enum etc) throw new PendingException(); }

BDD

The two main practices in the BDD approach are discovery workshops, which bridge the communication gap between business and IT, and executable specifications.

Background

Background:
Given I have been issued a new card
And I insert the card, entering the correct PIN And I choose "Change PIN" from the menu
Scenario: Change PIN successfully
When I change the PIN to 9876
Then the system should remember my PIN is now 9876
Scenario: Try to change PIN to the same as before
When I try to change the PIN to the original PIN number Then I should see a warning message
And the system should not have changed my PIN

Our refactoring hasn’t changed the behavior of the tests at all: at runtime, the steps in the background are executed at the beginning of each scenario, just as they were before. What we have done is made each individual scenario much easier to read.

Using a Background element isn’t always necessary, but it’s often useful to improve the readability of your features by removing repetitive steps from individual scenarios.

A good ‘background’

  • Make your Background section vivid. Use colorful names and try to tell a story, because your readers can keep track of stories much better than they can keep track of dull names like User A, User B, Site 1, and so on. If it’s worth mentioning at all, make it really stand out.
  • Keep your scenarios short, and don’t have too many. If the Background is more than three or four steps long, think about using higher-level steps or splitting the feature file in two. You can use a background as a good indicator of when a feature is getting too long: if the new scenarios you want to add don’t fit with the existing background, consider splitting the feature.
  • Avoid putting technical details such as clearing queues, starting back- end services, or opening browsers in a background.

Backgrounds are useful for taking Given (and sometimes When) steps that are repeated in each scenario and moving them to a single place. This helps keep your scenarios clear and concise.

Discovery Workshops

Discovery workshops (or Specification workshops) are short and frequent meetings where business and IT meet to gain a common understanding of how the software should behave.

Relationship with TDD

The main difference is that Cucumber operates on a higher abstraction level, closer to the domain and farther away from classes and methods. BDD builds on TDD, while preserving a strong link between the business requirements and the technical solution.

Outside in

This technique is called Outside-in because programmers typically start with the functionality that is closest to the user (the user interface, which is on the outside of the system) and gradually work towards the guts of the system (business logic, persistence, messaging and so on) as they discover more of what needs to be implemented.

Your cucumber features should drive your implementation, not reflect it.

This means Cucumber features should be written before the code implementing the feature.

Notice that we’re just sketching out the interface to the class, rather than adding any implementation to it. This way of working is fundamental to out- side-in development. We try not to think about how the Account is going to work yet but concentrate on what it should be able to do.

Keeping specifications, regression tests and documentation in a single place reduces the overhead of keeping multiple documents in sync - the Cucumber scenarios work as a shared source of truth for business and IT.

While many people focus on the value added by the automated “tests” you get out of BDD, the real value is actually the shared understanding we get at the beginning.

Cucumber is not a tool for testing software. It is a tool for testing people’s understanding of how software (yet to be written) should behave.

The biggest advantage of BDD approach for software development might be that they describe a set of functions that a user expects from a system in a very concrete and direct manner. The sum of these behaviors essentially document a contract with the user/client. If any of the tests fail, this contract is not upheld.

Process

the most important stage of BDD. Three amigos (business persons, developers, testers) get together and identify the expected behavior of our product by discussing examples. We can use feature mapping approach to effectively analyse and elaborate the product behavior.

always make sure that your scenarios are not tightly coupled with your tests. Your BDD scenarios should change only when the requirement changes, not when the the implementation changes (i.e. your BDD scenarios must drive the implementation, not the other way around).

Executable Specification

An Executable Specification is a Definition of Done that you can run as a test. In Behavior Driven Development (BDD), we refer to acceptance criteria as “executable specifications.” Executable Specifications are meant to be clear, unambiguous, written in business terms, and easy to automate. Each acceptance criteria is a concrete example of how a user interacts with the system to achieve some business goal.

The most well-known format for BDD acceptance criteria uses the “Given-When-Then” structure:

Given <some precondition>
When <something happens>
Then <we expect some outcome>

This format is a great way to make sure that we are thinking in terms of the outcomes we want to achieve. After all, the outcomes of an application are where the value lies.

These scenarios are also easy to automate with BDD tools like Cucumber and Specflow.

No silver bullet

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.” We’ve all worked on projects where, because of a misunderstanding, code that we’d worked hard on for several days or more had to be thrown away. Better communication between developers and stakeholders is essential to help avoid this kind of wasted time. One technique that really helps facilitate this communication is the use of concrete examples to illustrate what we want the software to do.

Concrete Examples

By using real-world examples to describe the desired behavior of the system we want to build, we stay grounded in language and terminology that makes sense to our stakeholders: we’re speaking their language.

To illustrate this, let’s imagine you’re building a credit card payment system. One of the requirements is to make sure users can’t enter bad data. Here’s one way of expressing that: Customers should be prevented from entering invalid credit card details. This is an example of what Agile teams often call acceptance criteria or condi- tions of satisfaction.1 We use the word acceptance because they tell us what the system must be able to do in order for our stakeholders to find it acceptable.

The previous requirements statement is useful, but it leaves far too much room for ambiguity and misunderstanding. It lacks precision. What exactly makes a set of details invalid? How exactly should the user be prevented from entering them? We’ve seen too many projects get dragged into the tar pit2 by these kind of worthy but vague statements. Let’s try illustrating this requirement with a concrete example: If a customer enters a credit card number that isn’t exactly 16 digits long, when they try to submit the form, it should be redisplayed with an error message advising them of the correct number of digits.

Can you see how much more specific this second statement is? As a developer implementing this feature, we know almost everything we need to be able to sit down and start working on the code. As a stakeholder, we have a much clearer idea of what the developer is going to build. In fact, a stakeholder reading this might point out that there are certain types of cards that are valid with fewer than 16 digits and give us another example. This is the real power of examples: they stimulate our imagination, enabling us to explore and discover edge cases we might otherwise not have found until much later.

By giving an example to illustrate our requirement, we’ve turned an acceptance criterion into an acceptance test. Now we have something unambiguous that we can use to test the behavior of the system, either manually or by using an automated test script.

Gherkins

Gherkin use main keywords: Feature, Scenario, Given, When, Then, And, But, Background, Scenario Outline, Examplesand some extra syntax “”” (Doc strings), (Data tables), @(Tags), # (Comments).

dry run

$ java -cp ".:jars/*" cucumber.api.cli.Main -g step_definitions --dry-run features

The –dry-run switch tells Cucumber to parse the file without executing it. It will tell you if your Gherkin isn’t valid.

Replacing Given/When/Then with Bullets

Some people find Given, When, Then, And, and But a little verbose. There is an additional keyword you can use to start a step: * (an asterisk). We could have written the previous scenario like this: Scenario: Attempt withdrawal using stolen card * I have $100 in my account

  • my card is invalid
  • I request $50
  • my card should not be returned
  • I should be told to contact the bank To Cucumber, this is exactly the same scenario. Do you find this version easier to read? Maybe. Did some of the meaning get lost? Maybe. It’s up to you and your team how you want to word things. The only thing that matters is that everybody understands what’s communicated.

CucumberOptions

the @CucumberOptions. One can define the location of features, glue files (step definitions), and formatter plugins inside this Cucumber options.

@CucumberOptions(
        features = "src/test/resources/features",
        glue = {"stepdefs"},
        tags = {"~@Ignore"},
        format = {
                "pretty",
                "html:target/cucumber-reports/cucumber-pretty",
                "json:target/cucumber-reports/CucumberTestReport.json",
                "rerun:target/cucumber-reports/rerun.txt"
        })
public class TestRunner {

Step definitions

Cucumber doesn’t know how to execute your scenarios out-of-the-box. It needs Step Definitions to translate plain text Gherkin steps into actionsthat will interact with the system. When Cucumber executes a Step in a Scenario, it will look for a matching Step Definition to execute.

After

one can implement initial configurations of the project in TestNG’s BeforeClass method. In cucumber’s Before hook, one can implement code to open web browser which is a prerequisite for all scenarios. In Background of each feature, one can implement steps to navigate to web site and/or login to account. In Cucumber’s After hook, one can take a snapshot of failure and close the browser.

tags

Grouping Features, Scenarios, and Step Definitions using Tags Tags is a great way made for Cucumber power users to organize their features and scenarios. In above example, by changing tags = {“~@Ignore”} line totags = {“@UpdateProfile”}, one can choose run only the features and scenarios tagged with @UpdateProfile tag. A Scenario or feature can have as many tags as you like. Just separate them with spaces: @important @maintenance @db @auth

If subfolders are the chapters in your book of features, then tags are the sticky notes you’ve put on pages you want to be able to find easily. You tag a scenario by putting a word prefixed with the @ character on the line before the Scenario keyword, like this: @widgets Scenario: Generate report Given I am logged in

There are three main reasons for tagging scenarios:

  • Documentation: You want to use a tag to attach a label to certain scenarios, for example to label them with an ID from a project management tool.
  • Filtering: Cucumber allows you to use tags as a filter to pick out specific scenarios to run or report on. You can even have Cucumber fail your test run if a certain tag appears too many times.
  • Hooks: Run a block of code whenever a scenario with a particular tag is about to start or has just finished.

config tag

Tags are a great way to organise your features and scenarios. Consider this example:

@billing Feature: Verify billing

@important Scenario: Missing product description Given hello

Scenario: Several products Given hello A feature or scenario or can have as many tags as you like. Just separate them with spaces:

@billing @bicker @annoy Feature: Verify billing Tags can be placed above the following Gherkin elements:

Feature Scenario Scenario Outline Examples It is not possible to place tags above Background or steps (Given, When, Then, And and But).

Cucumber for java 8 lambda

Using Lambda Expressions for Step Definitions Java Step Definitions are written in regular classes which don’t need to extend or implement anything. They can be written either using lambda expressions or method annotations. In the above, we used the method annotations. To use lambda expressions, use cucumber-java8 module instead of cucumber-java module in your pom.xml file.

When you use the cucumber-java8 module, you can write the Step Definitions using lambdas:

package cucumber;

import cucumber.api.java8.En;
 
public class StepDefinitions implements En {
    public StepDefinitions() {
        Given("I have (\\d+) cukes in my belly", (Integer cukes) -> {
            System.out.format("Cukes: %n\n", cukes);
        });
    }
}


package steps;
 
import cucumber.api.java8.En;
 
public class MyStepdefs implements En {
 
    public MyStepdefs() {
       Given("I login as (.*)$",(String name)-> System.out.println(name));
    }
}

Gherkin

Cucumber tests are expressed using a syntax called Gherkin. Gherkin files are plain text and have a .feature extension.

Steps and Step Definitions

Let’s start by clarifying the distinction between a step and a step definition. Each Gherkin scenario is made up of a series of steps, written in plain lan- guage. On its own, a step is just documentation; it needs a step definition to bring it to life. A step definition is a piece of code that says to Cucumber, “If you see a step that looks like this…, then here’s what I want you to do….” When Cucumber tries to execute each step, it looks for a matching step defi- nition to execute. So, how does Cucumber match a step definition to a step?

Creating a Step Definition

If Cucumber sees a step definition with this regular expression, it will execute it when it comes to the first step of our scenario. So, how do we create a step definition?

Step definitions live in ordinary files. To create a step definition in Java, you use a special Cucumber annotation, such as @Given, like this: @Given(“I have \$100 in my Account”) public void iHave$100InMyAccount() throws Throwable { // TODO: code that puts $100 into User’s Account goes here }

Given, When, Then Are the Same

It doesn’t actually matter which of the three methods you use to register a step definition, because Cucumber ignores the keyword when matching a step. Under the hood, all of the annotations are aliases for StepDefAnnotation.

The best way we’ve found to avoid this kind of problem is to pay careful attention to the precise wording in your steps. You could change both steps to be less ambiguous: Given I have deposited $100 in my Account Then the balance of my Account should be $100 By rewording the steps like this, you’ve made them better at communicating exactly what they will do when executed. Learning to spot and remove this kind of ambiguity is something that takes practice. Paying attention to the distinction in wording between two steps like this can also give you hints about concepts that may not be expressed in your code but need to be. It might seem pedantic, but we’ve found that teams who pay this much careful attention to detail write much better software, faster.

Alternation

We can specify a wildcard in a regular expression using a few different approaches. One of the simplest is alternation, where we express different options separated by a pipe character |, like this:

@Given("I have deposited \\$(100|250) in my Account") public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) {
  // TODO: code goes here
}

This step definition will now match a step with either of the two values 100 or 250 in it, and the number will be captured and passed to the method as an argument. Alternation can be useful if there are a fixed set of values that you want to accept in your step definition, but normally you’ll want something a little looser.

The Dot

The dot is a metacharacter, meaning it has magical powers in a regular expression. Literally, a dot means match any single character. So, we can try this instead:

@Given("I have deposited \\$(...) in my Account") public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) {
  // TODO: code goes here
}

That will now match a step with any three-figure dollar sum and send the matched amount into the method.

What If I Actually Want to Match a Dot?

Any of the metacharacters like the dot can be escaped by preceding them with a backslash. So, if you wanted to specifically match, say 3.14, you could use “3\.14”. You might have noticed that there’s a backslash in front of the dollar amount in the step definition we’re using. That’s because $ itself is a metacharacter (it’s an anchor, which we’ll explain later), so we need to escape to make it match a normal dollar sign.

Star modifier

The star modifier means any number of times. So, with .* we’re capturing any character, any number of times. Now we’re getting somewhere—this will allow us to capture all those different amounts. But there’s still a problem. The star modifier is a bit of a blunt instrument. Because we’re using it with the dot that matches any character, it will gobble up any text at all up until the phrase in my Account. This is why, in regex terminology, the star modifier is known as a greedy operator. For example, it would happily match this step: Given I have deposited $1 and a cucumber in my Account The amount captured by our regular expression in this case would be 1 and a cucumber. We need to be more specific about the characters we want to match and just capture numbers. Instead of a dot, we can use something else.

Character Classes

Character classes allow you to tell the regular expression engine to match one of a range of characters. You just place all of the characters you would accept inside square brackets:

@Given("I have deposited \\$([01234567890]*) in my Account") public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) {
  // TODO: code goes here
}
For a continuous range of characters like we have, you can use a hyphen:
@Given("I have deposited \\$([0-9]*) in my Account") public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) {
  // TODO: code goes here
}

Shorthand Character Classes

For common patterns of characters like [0-9], there are a few shorthand char- acter classes that you can use instead. You may find this just makes your regular expressions more cryptic, but there are only a few to learn. For a digit, you can use \d as a shorthand for [0-9]:

@Given("I have deposited \\$(\\d*) in my Account") public void iHaveDeposited$InMyAccount(int amount) {
  // TODO: code goes here
}

Here are the most useful shorthand character classes: \d stands for digit, or [0-9]. \w stands for word character, specifically [A-Za-z0-9_]. Notice that underscores and digits are included but not hyphens. \s stands for whitespace character, specifically [ \t\r\n]. That means a space, a tab, or a line break. \b stands for word boundary, which is a lot like \s but actually means the opposite of \w. Anything that is not a word character is a word boundary. You can also negate shorthand character classes by capitalizing them, so for example, \D means any character except a digit. Back to matching our amount. It looks like we’re done, but there’s one last problem to fix. Can you see what it is?

question mark

Like the star and the plus, the question mark modifies the character that precedes it, specifying how many times it can be repeated. The question mark modifier means zero or one times; in other words, it makes the preceding character optional. In step definitions, it’s particularly useful for plurals: @Given(“I have (\d+) cucumbers? in my basket”) public void iHaveCucumbersInMyBasket(int number) { // TODO: code goes here }

noncapturing group

@When(“I (?:visit|go to) the homepage”) public void iVisitTheHomepage() { // TODO: code goes here } Notice that we’ve had to prefix the list of alternates with another bit of regular expression magic. The ?: at the start of the group marks it as noncapturing, meaning Cucumber won’t pass it as an argument to our block.

Anchors

The undefined steps start with a ^ and end with a $. These two metacharacters are called anchors, because they’re used to tie down each end of the regular expression to the beginning and end of the string that they match on.

Generally, it’s best to keep your regular expressions as tight as you can so that there’s less chance of two step definitions clashing with each other.

Guides on how to write scenarios

Try to avoid being guided by existing step definitions when you write your scenarios and just write down exactly what you want to happen, in plain English. In fact, try to avoid programmers or testers writing scenarios on their own. Instead, get nontechnical stakeholders or analysts to write the first draft of each scenario from a purely business-focused perspective or ideally in a pair with a programmer to help them share their mental model. With a well- engineered support layer, you can confidently and quickly write new step definitions to match the way the scenario has been expressed.

Imperative Steps

In computer programming, there are two contrasting styles for expressing the instructions you give to a computer to make it do something for you. These styles are called imperative programming and declarative programming.

Imperative programming means using a sequence of commands for the com- puter to perform in a particular order. Java is an example of an imperative language: you write a program as a series of statements that Java runs one at a time, in order. A declarative program tells the computer what it should do without prescribing precisely how to do it. CSS is an example of a declar- ative language: you tell the computer what you want the various elements on a web page to look like, and you leave it to take care of the rest.

Use a Declarative Style Instead

Let’s raise the level of abstraction in this scenario and rewrite it using a more declarative style: Scenario: Redirect user to originally requested page after logging in Given I am an unauthenticated User When I attempt to view some restricted content Then I am shown a login form When I authenticate with valid credentials Then I should be shown the restricted content The beauty of this style is that it is not coupled to any specific implementation of the user interface. This same scenario could apply to a thick-client or mobile application. The words it uses aren’t technical and are instead written in a language (unauthenticated, restricted, credentials) that any stakeholder interested in security should be able to clearly understand. It’s by expressing every scenario at this level of abstraction that you discover your team’s ubiquitous language.

DAMP

However, when you are using examples to drive your code, there is another principle in play that I believe trumps the DRY principle: the examples should tell a good story. They are the docu- mentation narrative that will guide future programmers (including you when you come back to change this code in three months time and you’ve forgotten what it does). In this case, clarity of intent is found in the quality of the narrative, not necessarily in minimizing duplication.

Some people refer to this as the DAMP principle: Descriptive and Meaningful Phrases. When you’re writing examples, readability is paramount, and DAMP trumps DRY.

We consider fixture data to be an antipattern. We much prefer using Test Data Builders, on page 104, where the relevant data is created within the test itself, rather than being buried away in a big tangled set of fixture data.

We find that teams that have a single humongous build also tend to have an architecture that could best be described as a big ball of mud. Because all of the behavior in the system is implemented in one place, all the tests have to live in one place, too, and have to all be run together as one big lump. This is a classic ailment of long-lived applications, which have grown organically without obvious interfaces between their subsystems.

Defect Prevention

Toyota’s counterintuitive but hugely successful policy of stopping the line works because it’s part of a wider process, known as defect prevention, that focuses on continuously improving the manufacturing system. Without this wider process, stop the line itself would have very little effect. There are four steps to this process:

  • Detect the abnormality.
  • Stop what you’re doing.
  • Fix or correct the immediate problem.
  • Investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure. This fourth step is crucial because it seizes the opportunity offered by the problem at hand to understand something more fundamental about your process. It also means that fixing things becomes a habit, rather than some- thing you put off to do someday later when you’re not in such a hurry.

Cucumber might just seem like a testing tool, but at its heart it’s really a collaboration tool. If you make a genuine effort to write features that work as documentation for the nontechnical stakeholders on your team, you’ll find you are forced to talk with them about details that you might never have otherwise made the time to talk about. Those conversations reveal insights about their understanding of the problem, insights that will help you build a much better solution than you would have otherwise. This is Cucumber’s big secret: the tests and documentation are just a happy side effect; the real value lies in the knowledge you discover during those conversations.

Reference

  • https://medium.com/agile-vision/cucumber-bdd-part-2-creating-a-sample-java-project-with-cucumber-testng-and-maven-127a1053c180
  • https://codoid.com/cucumber-lambda-expressions/

2024

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awesome mr W

2 minute read

You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.

Flyway Self Healing

less than 1 minute read

how to let your flyway database scheme migrate more robustly and self healing

Flyway Self Healing

less than 1 minute read

how to let your flyway database scheme migrate more robustly and self healing

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2023

Az Cli

less than 1 minute read

To run commands in VMs in Azure

Cheap and flexible computing

1 minute read

whether it seems possible or not - go for it Cheaper X 2 to EC2, to use Fargate Spot With Fargate Spot you can run interruption tolerant Amazon ECS t...

Understanding React export a Component

1 minute read

A young idler, an old beggar. - William Shakespeare Understanding React export a Component In this blog post, we will dive into the code of the RepoU...

UUID deep dive

4 minute read

A young idler, an old beggar. - William Shakespeare

which-port-my-service-is-running

2 minute read

Summary As a Java developer, it’s important to know how to find out which port number your Spring service is running on. This information is useful when you ...

Elk Search Tips

less than 1 minute read

message:/'Invoking SP with quoteContext*werqewr-1234asdf-sdf23-9d83-asdf23*'/

what is StrictHostKeyChecking in ssh

less than 1 minute read

What’s and how to avoid error of the authenticity of host ‘xxx’ can’t be established You can suppress the “The authenticity of host ‘’ can’t be established” ...

Chinese Verb

less than 1 minute read

知其雄，守其雌 什么意思

What’s Difference Of Cny And Cnh

3 minute read

what’s difference of CNY and CNH CNY and CNH are both currencies used in China, but they are different in a few important ways:

Spring Cloud Master Piece 9

7 minute read

What’s spring cloud config Spring Cloud Config is a distributed configuration server that provides a centralized location to manage external properties for a...

Spring Cloud Master Piece 6

1 minute read

Sample me build a micro service payment system with spring cloud Here’s an example of building a microservice payment system using Spring Cloud:

Spring Cloud Master Piece 2

5 minute read

what’s usage of bootstrap yml In a Spring Boot application, the bootstrap.yml (or bootstrap.properties) file is used for configuring the application’s enviro...

Spring Cloud Master Piece 1

7 minute read

what’s API gateway An API Gateway is a key component in microservices architecture that acts as a single entry point for client requests to a microservices-b...

Master Microfrontends

4 minute read

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” - Steve Jobs

How To Config JFR Java Flight Control

2 minute read

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness i...

Google マップ内の写真のコメントが表示されない

less than 1 minute read

紹介 私は、私のOppo Androidスマートフォンのアプリ「Googleマップ」で奇妙な問題が発生していることに気づきました。Googleマップで特定の場所（例えば「中央公園」）を検索すると、通常、このアプリは公園の写真やコメントリストを表示するはずです。例えば、誰かが公園の芝生や川の写真を投稿し、便利な場所...

master-cglib-in-java

2 minute read

You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.

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2022

Minium Workable Mvp Vimrc

6 minute read

”—————————————————————- “ 4. User interface “—————————————————————- “ Set X lines to the cursor when moving vertically set scrolloff=0

Linux Tips

5 minute read

Remember, some things have to end for better things to begin.

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2021

How to user fire extinguisher

less than 1 minute read

Summary As you know, staff and your safety is paramount. So what if emergency take place, such as fire in office, how to help yourself and your colleagues by...

Deep dive into Kubernetes Client API

1 minute read

Summary To talk to K8s for getting data, there are few approaches. While K8s’ official Java library is the most widely used one. This blog will look into thi...

Whitelabel Error Page

less than 1 minute read

Summary Whitelabel Error Page is the default error page in Spring Boot web app. It provide a more user-friently error page whenever there are any issues when...

Debts in a nutshell

less than 1 minute read

A debt security represents a debt owed by the issuer to an investor. Here, the investor acts as a lender to the issuer which may be a government, organisatio...

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2020

How to process data from S3 download URL

less than 1 minute read

S3 download URL As you know, AWS S3 object can be downloaded/processed by S3 download URL. I’m showing you two examples on how to process S3 Object by NIO f...

Debug Stuck IntelliJ

1 minute read

What happened to a debug job hanging in IntelliJ (IDEAS) IDE? You may find when you try to debug a class in Intellij but it stuck there and never proceed, e....

Awesome Kotlin

less than 1 minute read

Difference with Scala Kotlin takes the best of Java and Scala, the response times are similar as working with Java natively, which is a considerable advantag...

JVM热身

1 minute read

此文是作者英文原文的翻译文章，英文原文在：http://todzhang.com/posts/2018-06-10-jvm-warm-up/

Mock in kotlin

2 minute read

Argument Matching & Answers For example, you have mocked DOC with call(arg: Int): Intfunction. You want to return 1 if argument is greater than 5 and -1 ...

Mock in kotlin

2 minute read

Argument Matching & Answers For example, you have mocked DOC with call(arg: Int): Intfunction. You want to return 1 if argument is greater than 5 and -1 ...

Docker

1 minute read

Dockers Concepts

Curl

less than 1 minute read

Linux Curl command

AOP

less than 1 minute read

The concept of join points as matched by pointcut expressions is central to AOP, and Spring uses the AspectJ pointcut expression language by default.

Micrometer notes

less than 1 minute read

As a general rule it should be possible to use the name as a pivot. Dimensions allow a particular named metric to be sliced to drill down and reason about th...

Awesome SSL certificates and HTTPS

16 minute read

What’s TLS TLS (Transport Layer Security) and its predecessor, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), are security protocols designed to secure the communication betwee...

JVM warm up by Escape Analysis

13 minute read

Why JVM need warm up I don’t know how and why you get to this blog. But I know the key words in your mind are “warm” for JVM. As the name “warm up” suggested...

Java Concurrent

54 minute read

This blog is about noteworthy pivot points about Java Concurrent Framework Back to Java old days there were wait()/notify() which is error prone, while fr...

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2019

Conversations with God

less than 1 minute read

Feelings is the language of the soul. If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look to how your’re feeling about.

Kafka In Spring

4 minute read

Enable Kafka listener annotated endpoints that are created under the covers by a AbstractListenerContainerFactory. To be used on Configuration classes as fol...

Mifid

1 minute read

FX Spot is not covered by the regulation, as it is not considered to be a financial instrument by ESMA, the European Union (EU) regulator. As FX is considere...

Foreign Exchange

less than 1 minute read

currency pairs Direct ccy: means USD is part of currency pair Cross ccy: means ccy wihtout USD, so except NDF, the deal will be split to legs, both with...

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2018

Seconds

less than 1 minute read

nano seconds

Citrix receiver

less than 1 minute read

“Cannot connect to remote desktop” with Citrix Receiver

Guice

7 minute read

A new type of Juice Put simply, Guice alleviates the need for factories and the use of new in your Java code. Think of Guice’s @Inject as the new new. You wi...

YAML

less than 1 minute read

Key points All YAML files (regardless of their association with Ansible or not) can optionally begin with — and end with …. This is part of the YAML format a...

Mockito

less than 1 minute read

Feature

Protobuf

5 minute read

What are protocol buffers?

Sudo in a Nutshell

6 minute read

Sudo in a Nutshell Sudo (su “do”) allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root...

Zoo-keeper

15 minute read

ZK Motto the motto “ZooKeeper: Because Coordinating Distributed Systems is a Zoo.”

Cucumber

28 minute read

Acceptance testing vs unit test It’s sometimes said that unit tests ensure you build the thing right, whereas acceptance tests ensure you build the right thi...

Scala

less than 1 minute read

Scala String

akka framework of scala

27 minute read

philosophy The actor model adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor. This is similar to the everything is an object philosophy used by some object-o...

Apache Camel

8 minute read

Camel’s message model In Camel, there are two abstractions for modeling messages, both of which we’ll cover in this section. org.apache.camel.Message—The ...

JXM

less than 1 minute read

Exporting your beans to JMX The core class in Spring’s JMX framework is the MBeanExporter. This class is responsible for taking your Spring beans and registe...

Solace MQ

1 minute read

Solace PubSub+ It is a message broker that lets you establish event-driven interactions between applications and microservices across hybrid cloud environmen...

Apigee

4 minute read

App deployment, configuration management and orchestration - all from one system. Ansible is powerful IT automation that you can learn quickly.

Ansible

10 minute read

Ansible: What Is It Good For? Ansible is often described as a configuration management tool, and is typically mentioned in the same breath as Chef, Puppet, a...

flexbox

4 minute read

How Flexbox works — explained with big, colorful, animated gifs

KDB

18 minute read

KDB However kdb+ evaluates expressions right-to-left. There are no precedence rules. The reason commonly given for this behaviour is that it is a much simple...

Portactor

1 minute read

Better to use smart wait

Agile and SCRUM

less than 1 minute read

Key concept In Scrum, a team is cross functional, meaning everyone is needed to take a feature from idea to implementation.

rxjs pipe in depth

6 minute read

https://stormforger.com/blog/2016/07/08/types-of-performance-testing/

Strategy-Of-Openshift-Releases

less than 1 minute read

Release & Testing Strategy There are various methods for safely releasing changes to Production. Each team must select what is appropriate for their own ...

NodeJs Notes

less than 1 minute read

commands to read files var lineReader = require(‘readline’).createInterface({ input: require(‘fs’).createReadStream(‘C:\dev\node\input\git_reset_files.tx...

Minium Viable Product

less than 1 minute read

https://blog.leanstack.com/minimum-viable-product-mvp-7e280b0b9418

CORS :Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

1 minute read

Cross-Origin Request Sharing - CORS (A.K.A. Cross-Domain AJAX request) is an issue that most web developers might encounter, according to Same-Origin-Policy,...

ngrx

2 minute read

Why @Effects? In a simple ngrx/store project without ngrx/effects there is really no good place to put your async calls. Suppose a user clicks on a button or...

iOS programming

3 minute read

View A view is also a responder (UIView is a subclass of UIResponder). This means that a view is subject to user interactions, such as taps and swipes. Thus,...

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2017

cloud computering

less than 1 minute read

openshift vs openstack The shoft and direct answer is `OpenShift Origin can run on top of OpenStack. They are complementary projects that work well together....

cloud computering

3 minute read

Concepts Cloud computing is the on-demand demand delivery of compute database storage applications and other IT resources through a cloud services platform v...

Redux

less than 1 minute read

whats @Effects You can almost think of your Effects as special kinds of reducer functions that are meant to be a place for you to put your async calls in suc...

reactive programing

less than 1 minute read

The second advantage to a lazy subscription is that the observable doesn’t hold onto data by default. In the previous example, each event generated by the in...

Container

2 minute read

The Docker project was responsible for popularizing container development in Linux systems. The original project defined a command and service (both named do...

promise vs observiable

less than 1 minute read

The drawback of using Promises is that they’re unable to handle data sources that produce more than one value, like mouse movements or sequences of bytes in ...

JDK source

less than 1 minute read

interface RandomAccess Marker interface used by List implementations to indicate that they support fast (generally constant time) random access. The primary ...

SSH SFTP

4 minute read

Secure FTP SFTP over FTP is the equivalant of HTTPS over HTTP, the security version

AWS Tips

less than 1 minute read

After establishing a SSH session, you can install a default web server by executing sudo yum install httpd -y. To start the web server, type sudo service htt...

Oracle

less than 1 minute read

ORA-12899: Value Too Large for Column

Spring notes

27 minute read

Spring Bean Life Cycle Callback Methods

Kindle notes

113 minute read

#《亿级流量网站架构核心技术》目录一览 TCP四层负载均衡 使用Hystrix实现隔离 基于Servlet3实现请求隔离 限流算法 令牌桶算法 漏桶算法 分布式限流 redis+lua实现 Nginx+Lua实现 使用sharding-jdbc分库分表 Disruptor+Redis...

Java Security Notes

7 minute read

Java Security well-behaved: programs should be prevent from consuming too much system resources

R Language

less than 1 minute read

s<-read.csv("C:/Users/xxx/dev/R/IRS/SHH_SCHISHG.csv") # aggregate s2<-table(s$Original.CP) s3<-as.data.frame(s2) # extract by Frequency ordered s3...

SSH and Cryptography

35 minute read

SFTP versus FTPS SS: Secure Shell An increasing number of our customers are looking to move away from standard FTP for transferring data, so we are ofte...

Eclipse notes

less than 1 minute read

How do I remove a plug-in? Run Help > About Eclipse > Installation Details, select the software you no longer want and click Uninstall. (On Macintosh i...

Java JVM

less than 1 minute read

Class loading subsystem

Maven-Notes

27 minute read

Maven philosophy “It is important to note that in the pom.xml file you specify the what and not the how. The pom.xml file can also serve as a documentatio...

Java New IO

less than 1 minute read

Notes JDK 1.0 introduced rudimentary I/O facilities for accessing the file system (to create a directory, remove a file, or perform another task), accessi...

IT-Architect

1 minute read

SOA SOA is a set of design principles for building a suite of interoperable, flexible and reusable services based architecture. top-down and bottom-up a...

Algorithm

15 minute read

This page is about key points about Algorithm

Java-Tricky-Tech-Questions.md

19 minute read

What is the difference between Serializable and Externalizable in Java? In earlier version of Java, reflection was very slow, and so serializaing large ob...

Compare-In-Java

6 minute read

Concepts If you implement Comparable interface and override compareTo() method it must be consistent with equals() method i.e. for equal object by equals(...

Java Collections Misc

3 minute read

Difference between equals and deepEquals of Arrays in Java Arrays.equals() method does not compare recursively if an array contains another array on oth...

HashMap in JDK

4 minute read

Hashmap in JDK Some note worth points about hashmap Lookup process Step# 1: Quickly determine the bucket number in which this element may resid...

Java 8 Tips

66 minute read

This blog is listing key new features introduced in Java 8

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2016

Java GC notes

28 minute read

verbose:gc verbose:gc prints right after each gc collection and prints details about each generation memory details. Here is blog on how to read verbose gc

Hash Code Misc

12 minute read

contract of hashCode : Whenever it is invoked on the same object more than once during an execution of a Java application, the hashCode method must consis...

Angulary Misc

2 minute read

Dependency Injection Angular doesn’t automatically know how you want to create instances of your services or the injector to create your service. You must co...

Random number in java

less than 1 minute read

ThreadLocalRandom, SecureRandm, java.util.Random, java.math.Random

Java new features

less than 1 minute read

JDK Versions JDK 1.5 in 2005 JDK 1.6 in 2006 JDK 1.7 in 2011 JDK 1.8 in 2014 Sun之前风光无限，但是在2010年1月27号被Oracle收购。 在被Oracle收购后对外承诺要回到每2年一个realse的节奏。但是20...

Simpler chronicle of CI(Continuous Integration) “乱弹系列”之持续集成工具

less than 1 minute read

引言 有句话说有人的地方就有江湖，同样，有江湖的地方就有恩怨。在软件行业历史长河（虽然相对于其他行业来说，软件行业的历史实在太短了，但是确是充满了智慧的碰撞也是十分的精彩）中有一些恩怨情愁，分分合合的小故事，比如类似的有，从一套代码发展出来后面由于合同到期就分道扬镳，然后各自发展成独门产品的Sybase DB和微...

浅谈软件单元测试中的“断言” (assert)，从石器时代进步到黄金时代。

less than 1 minute read

大家都知道，在软件测试特别是在单元测试时,必用的一个功能就是“断言”（Assert)，可能有些人觉得不就一个Assert语句，没啥花头，也有很多人用起来也是懵懵懂懂，认为只要是Assert开头的方法，拿过来就用。一个偶然的机会跟人聊到此功能，觉得还是有必要在此整理一下如何使用以及对“断言”的理解。希望可以帮助大家...

Head First Blockchina 1

less than 1 minute read

深入浅出区块链系统：第一章. what you should know about blockchain

Kubernetes 与 Docker Swarm的对比

less than 1 minute read

Kubernetes 和Docker Swarm 可能是使用最广泛的工具，用于在集群环境中部署容器。但是这两个工具还是有很大的差别。

http methods

11 minute read

RFC origion http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html#sec9.1.2)

Spark-vs-Storm

less than 1 minute read

The stark difference among Spark and Storm. Although both are claimed to process the streaming data in real time. But Spark processes it as micro-batches; wh...

微服务

less than 1 minute read

可以想像一下，之前的传统应用系统，像是一个大办公室里面，有各个部门，销售部，采购部，财务部。办一件事情效率比较高。但是也有一些弊端，首先，各部门都在一个房间里。

kibana, view layer of elasticsearch

less than 1 minute read

What’s Kibana kibana is an open source data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch. It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on...

kibana, view layer of elasticsearch

less than 1 minute read

What’s Kibana kibana is an open source data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch. It provides visualization capabilities on top of the content indexed on...

iConnect

less than 1 minute read

UI HTML5, AngularJS, BootStrap, REST API, JSON Backend Hadoop core (HDFS), Hive, HBase, MapReduce, Oozie, Pig, Solr

Business Analysis

less than 1 minute read

Purpose of BA 带来一些商业价值（收益） 解决业务痛点

Data Structure

2 minute read

Binary Tree A binary tree is a tree in which no node can have more than two children. A property of a binary tree that is sometimes important is that th...

equity trading

less than 1 minute read

Difference between mutal funds and hedge funds

SQL

less than 1 minute read

Differences between not in, not exists , and left join with null

HTTPS/2

less than 1 minute read

concepts

Github page commands notes

less than 1 minute read

404 error for customized domain (such as godday) 404 There is not a GitHub Pages site here. Go to github master branch for gitpages site, manually add CN...

RenMinBi International

1 minute read

RQFII RQFII stands for Renminbi Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor. RQFII was introduced in 2011 to allow qualified foreign institutional investors to ...

Load Balancing

less than 1 minute read

Concepts LVS means Linux Virtual Server, which is one Linux built-in component.

Python

less than 1 minute read

(‘—–Unexpected error:’, <type ‘exceptions.TypeError’>) datetime.datetime.now()

Setup Git in Mint Linux

less than 1 minute read

How to setup Git in Mint Linux =================================================

Microservices vs. SOA

1 minute read

Microservice Services are organized around capabilities, e.g., user interface front-end, recommendation, logistics, billing, etc. Services are small in ...

Java Class Loader

33 minute read

Codecache The maximum size of the code cache is set via the -XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=N flag (where N is the default just mentioned for the particular com...

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