"The Cucumber Book" Book Writeup
June 21, 2012
The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers
Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy
ISBN: 1934356808
What’s the point?
Cucumber is a tool for writing BDD tests. This book is an introduction to using the tool
and then a worked example of using Cucumber to drive the development of a web-based ATM
interface. The focus is primarily on using it to test Ruby applications, but the tool
can be used for virtually any language.
How was it?
The book did its advertised job of explaining how to use Cucumber, but it is really
not that hard. I would have liked for the author to spend more time explaining how to
use Cucumber in conjunction with unit tests. The balance of integration, unit,
and acceptance tests is one of the things I am struggling with as I explore TDD and this
book, unfortunately, didn’t help much in that regard.
Who should read it?
I would recommend the book as a way for someone to pick up Cucumber if they were going to
use it on a project, but I don’t think it is strictly necessary.