I’ve use Test API for behavior testing for more than a year now, and to great effect. I expected my recent experience with Gherkin to be similar, but found the two BDD techniques to be surprisingly different. Here I’ll contrast the two methods to highlight their distinct value.
I finally got hands-on experience with Gherkin, the common language for Behavior-driven Development (BDD). Getting started was more of a struggle than I anticipated. Here are solutions to some of my main hangups.
Learning functional programming has included significant quality time with Type-Driven Development and property-based testing. These paradigms highlighted a gap in my previous testing techniques. It led me to better classify types of communication errors between customers and code, and the toolset for addressing each type.
Paul’s Test Api permanently changed the way that I test. It’s only natural I’d want to bring the pattern over to F# with me. Here’s how I did it and a few extra testing tips for F#.
A friend of mine, Paul Spoon, wrote a delightful article about using the Anti-Corruption Layer pattern as a tool for more stable tests. I tried the pattern with skepticism, and will now never go back. Let’s take a brief look at the pattern then dive into the benefits I’ve experienced.
“Tools amplify your talent. The better your tools, and the better you know how to use them, the more productive you can be.” – Andrew Hunt (The Pragmatic Programmer)
“Coding ain’t done ‘til the tests run” - The Pragmatic Programmer “The act of writing a unit test closes a remarkable number of feedback loops, the least of which is the one pertaining to verification of the function” – Robert Martin
“There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” – C.A.R. Hoare