On 19 Jul 2013, at 21:45, Sean Bamforth <[email protected]> wrote: > One thing I liked about cucumber/rspec is that it forces you to rephrase your > solution. Any test unit does this to a degree, but with rspec, this > rephrasing is more extreme. I think that if you have to correctly describe a > problem in two different "languages", your understanding of the problem space > has to be better than describing with one.
This sounds like the argument that writing gherkin helps you get a better understanding of the problem. Writing a good agile story helps you get a better understanding of a problem, as does the discussion that allows you to write that story. Gherkin is a very limiting way to write stories (but a good way to get started, if you've never done it before), doesn't force you to dive very deep, and therefore isn't as useful as the available alternatives (e.g. English). Gherkin will only shed further light on your problem if you sit down at your keyboard before you've got a good idea what you're trying to do. If you find it doing that you should get out of your chair and approach your (let's call them a "customer") with a writing implement and something to sketch on. Conversation and pictures are a far richer medium for discovering and understanding the complexities of the problems we deal with. > Better understanding = less bugs. Building a solution to the wrong problem isn't a bug. A better understanding of your problem domain leads to less time (it's money really) wasted. I'm all for that, but Gherkin and Cucumber are a poor way to uncover this knowledge. I'd love to show people who think Cucumber helps them explore desired behaviour how to do it in a faster, more sociable and more fun way. > I no longer believe the "business cost" argument. Business cost pretends to > be measurable, but it is not. This is especially true when you're measuring > the cost/benefit over decades. That implies that it's okay to ignore factors that are hard to measure. I doubt you mean that though, as it's clearly not the case. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NWRUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nwrug-members. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
