What to use today about Behaviour-Driven Development and Acceptance Tests?

Question

Some years ago I´ve tried to work with BDD and some tools of Acceptance tests, like Selenium/Web-driver, Fitnesse and JBehave.

I´d like to back to work with that in my current project, so I would like to know what the community is using of tools to perform that!

My project is based on Java.

Acceptance tests tools ? BDD tools? Should I consider a scripting language ?

Answer 1

I strongly recommend spockframework + Geb. You need groovy support though. We have lot of tests running as part of CI every night. The reports are in junit format (being enhanced to be used by business users soon) and hence can be published to servers like Hudson or Sonar.

Answer 2

The most successful teams are using conversations and not worrying too much about the tools!

Having said that, here are a few Java BDD tools that are in use in the community:

• JBehave* (still)
• Cucumber for the JVM (I don't think it's been as maven-ized as JBehave)
• Fitnesse (though I recommend putting "Slim" behind it instead of "Fit")
• Custom DSLs (it's not that hard).

Selenium is still the automation tool of choice for Java and the web.

*I helped write JBehave. One reason we got into it in the first place was because the acceptance tests we saw using scripts were such an astonishing mess. Meh. Also, you can't collaborate with the business or have conversations about scripts. I strongly recommend having conversations first**, then worrying about the tools!

** If you're working on your own, buy a rubber duck.