what are the required Gem for Automated Acceptance testing

Question

I want to write acceptance testing through cucumber and capybara. i have experience with rspec. I want to write integration/features test cases . I want outcome to be seen on a web browser which shows the test case running. what are the gems required for writing test cases .

Answer 1

If you are already familiar with RSpec, I recommend you to use RSpec with Capybara for acceptance testing. RSpec is testing framework, and Capybara is a library that helps you to test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app.

Acceptance tests in RSpec with Capybara are called "feature specs" and live in /spec/features directory in Rails. Capybara comes with a built in DSL for writing descriptive acceptance tests with RSpec (feature/scenario), but you may also use traditional RSpec DSL (describe/it).

Capybara supports several drivers, and its default driver RackTest doesn't support JavaScript. So, probably, you'll want to use one of the alternative drivers (I prefer Poltergeist, but it is headless, so if you want to see result in the browser, you may use Selenium driver). In this case, you'll need to set up database_cleaner to clear your database between tests. Capybara's README contains a lot of information about its configuration and usage with RSpec, configuring driver and using database_cleaner.

You can start with this and this screencasts. But remember, that they are a little bit outdated and use traditional RSpec DSL (instead of new Capybara DSL), and use old convention, when "feature" specs were called "request" specs. Currently, by convention, "request" specs, are integration tests without capybara. So you'll need to create your capybara specs in spec/features directory, not spec/requests. And if you want to use Capybara DSL, this is easy to fix too. Just replace describe with feature, it with scenario, let with given etc. It is well documented in Capybara's README.

Hope this helps.