Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

There is a tool written in Ruby called Cucumber. It parses English-like user story steps for testing. Stuff like:


User navigates to '/orders'
User presses 'view orders'
User sees 'You have 22 order'


It takes those sentences and runs them against code that actually performs the tests in the web browser. This means you can write English-like acceptance tests that everyone can understand, even non-programmers.

We are experimenting with integrating that into our workflow. The benefit is that we can provide automated periodic health checks on production sites to make sure all the features are still working and that no regression errors have been introduced.