Spock as a DSL

Test-driven development (TDD) has become an essential capability for software developers over the past decade. TDD can mean different things to different organizations. It can mean the adoption of a full-blown test first style of coding, where unit tests are written before any functional code. It could just mean that you write extensive unit tests for every piece of functional code in the system. It may or may not mean the use of continuous integration builds that run a battery of unit tests after each code check in. Whatever TDD means to your organization, the chances are that flavors of xUnit test frameworks, including JUnit, WEBUnit, and HTTPUnit have been essential tools in your software developer's arsenal for some considerable time now.

The problem with xUnit-style testing is that these are all tools that are designed by programmers, for programmers. Your QA staff might be familiar with running xUnit tests and reporting on problems that they encounter, but they...