Using BDD and gherkinising your Acceptance Tests

In my post Testing of Automated tests, I mention about a BDD framework which involves using BDD to drive your acceptance tests. BDD stands for Behaviour Driven Development. 

One effective method of writing BDD tests are by using a format known as Gherkin language. These consist of Given, When, Thens. The main advantage of the gherkin language is that it's readable by the business, and in an ideal world forms part of the Conditions of Acceptance around a PBI.

Also, using a Visual Studio plugin of SpecFlow, you can integrate your Gherkinised COAs into your solution with feature files, and then drive the automated tests, however, for this post I will focus solely on how to effectively gherkinise your acceptance tests.

A Feature file consists of a feature outline, which details what the feature file is testing followed by Scenarios and examples (parameters). The BDD scenarios are made up of a Given, When, Then... These are effectively an initial state (Given), an action (When) and an assertion (Then). 

We will use a generic example of being able to search on the google homepage, so an example of this would be:

Feature: Searching on Google
In order to find information about a topic
As a website User
I want to be able to view search results for a topic

Scenario Outline: User is displayed search results when searching for a search term that has results
Given I am on the Google SearchPage
When I search for a <searchTerm>
Then the search results page is displayed

Examples:
|searchTerm|
| Sunderland AFC |

You would then have the searchterm as a parameter (in this case Sunderland AFC), meaning the step is more reusable. If you wanted, you could add more searchterms and run the test multiple times:


Examples:
|searchTerm|
| Sunderland AFC |
| Manchester United |
| Arsenal |

If we wanted to add a slightly different test, one that checks for the Did you mean text, this would be easily achieved by using the same Given step, and the same When step, but changing the Then...


Scenario Outline: User is displayed the Showing results for text when searching for an incorrect term
Given I am on the Google SearchPage
When I search for a <searchTerm>
Then the Showing Results For page is displayed with <expectedText>

Examples:
|searchTerm| expectedText |
| Sunnderland | Sunderland| 

So the above scenario checks for the Showing Results for text when the user has misspelled a search term. However, the only new step is the Then step. This isn't that beneficial when used just as a manual test, however the real value comes when automating the tests, which we will do in the coming days/weeks, the aim of this mini project is to create from scratch a simple set of automated tests, that run against Googles search engine, using the page object model (which I will discuss in a future post as well) with Selenium WebDriver and C#. If you have any specifics over something you'd like me to cover, then leave a comment, and I'll try and put it into the posts in the future.