I added a few more tips that I've picked up over the years. https://gist.github.com/jonnybot0/dcb7fb817ae6c1860eaec164391b49b7
Most are additions (ways to make your test not flaky, link to the Geb docs), but there is one place that I pushed back hard against James's clanker: > *Overusing required: false* on optional content - the only time you really want to mark a page element as required: false is when your spec *needs* to try to interact with it when it's absent (for example, to assert that it isn't present, !page.buttons.sometimesThereButton). If the button may or may not be there, but you never test the case where it isn't there, you should just leave it as required. Remember, throwing an exception when something *exceptional* happens is okay, especially in tests! This was something that was drilled into me by Marcin, the former maintainer of Geb *and* hard experience. I saw more than one case where someone added `required: false` as a way to address flakiness in a test that only *hid* the flakiness and moved it downstream. And that someone was, often enough, me. AIs are even more prone to this kind of quick-fix, unhelpfully-defensive thinking, so it's probably best if we ward them off it out the gate. Best, Jonny On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 11:08 AM James Daugherty via dev < [email protected]> wrote: > This was generated by an AI, but it is probably a good starting point: > https://gist.github.com/jdaugherty/f63781ff72c826b14f20fc3a2a41020e > If anyone has feedback, it would be most welcome. > > I know that some people are using services like https://skills.sh/ to > index skills. Creating a dedicated repo for skills may be useful for > Groovy / Geb. > > -James > > On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 8:00 AM Jochen Theodorou <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > On 4/12/26 19:44, James Daugherty via dev wrote: > > > Hi Everyone, > > > > > > The Grails project has been gradually expanding its Geb test coverage > > > and as we've reviewed the old tests / improved on them, it's become > > > clear there are some best practices with Geb that we didn't always > > > follow. This got me thinking: in the age of AI, the Grails team has > > > discussed including AI skills (https://agentskills.io/home) as part of > > > our development process to better help adoption. Has such a topic > > > been discussed for Geb? Does anyone have a good starting skill for > > > Geb? > > Not me, but I would say to just write something and then let other > > people look over it to improve it. > > > > bye Jochen >
