Automated acceptance testing

Automated acceptance testing is a method of ensuring that your testing is valid from the end user's point of view.

Cucumber is a framework where test cases are written in plaintext and associated with test code. This is called behavior-driven development. The original implementation of Cucumber was written in Ruby, but ports now exist for many different languages.

The appeal of Cucumber from a DevOps point of view is that it is intended to bring different roles together. Cucumber feature definitions are written in a conversational style that can be achieved without programming skills. The hard data required for test runs is then extracted from the descriptions and used for the tests.

While the intentions are good, there are difficulties in implementing Cucumber that might not immediately be apparent. While the language of the behavior specifications is basically free text, they still need to be somewhat spartan and formalized; otherwise, it becomes difficult to...