The Simplest Possible Cucumber Test

I’m not really that good at testing. So what, so are a lot of people. Having some tests is better than none! And, the way testing tutorials are written can seem really complex and scary. Today I started thinking about the simplest possible way to get started with web app testing.

When I’m getting back into a project after not working on it for a while, I just want to know whether the application works. I want to know whether it will run on my development environment, even if I’m on a new machine. I have three computers that I use at various locations so this is important to me.

So for me the simplest possible test would be:

• The home page should load. That is the default route should return a successful page without any errors. It will have some key piece of text that says it’s working.

Here’s how I do it with cucumber:

If you haven’t installed the cucumber gems yet, put this in your config/test.rbfile.

If you haven’t cucumber set up yet, run

script/generate cucumber

Then, create the file below:

File: features/homepage.feature

Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

Scenario: Homepage should say Search
  When I go to the homepage
  Then I should see "Search"

Tip: none of what you write in the Feature section really matters. It’s just for you or your client’s benefit.

Then, run

cucumber features

You should get the following output:

:> cucumber features
Feature: View homepage for app
  In order to make sure the app loads
  As a user
  I want to see the home page

  Scenario: Homepage should say Search # features/homepage.feature:6
    When I go to the homepage          # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:10
    Then I should see "My Telltale Text" # features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb:118

1 scenario (1 passed)
2 steps (2 passed)

Some cool things about this: “the homepage” is something that cucumber / webrat understands out of the box. See features/step_definitions/webrat_steps.rb for how to define other custom route names. And also, “I should see “something in quotes” is out of the box cucumber goodness.