Cucumber

Cucumber is a third party library, dedicated for Behaviour-Driver Development.

It is possible to run Bobcat with Cucumber, although we have changed the approach in version 2.1.0 - you can read about it more below.

Background, i.e. where is bb-cumber module?

From the very beginning Bobcat had its own module for Cucumber integration, bb-cumber, similar to the way we have bb-junit5. It provided Cucumber dependencies and few additional utilities we have developed.

Cucumber-JVM had its own limitations, which we have tried to overcome by extending its won runner. This has proven to be problematic in terms of maintainability in the longer run. In addition, we realized we are not doing BDD but using Cucumber as a test runner - we did not see any additional value in our projects, that is why we have started to favor a pure JUnit approach, especially after JUnit 5 has been released.

In the meantime, Cucumber-JVM has introduced few enhancements that previously had to been handled by additional Maven plugins (e.g. parallel runs) and after updating Bobcat with the latest Cucumber release, removing the uncompatible functonalities, we have realized that bb-cumber is left with… a single class. Hence, we have decided to scrap the module totally, especially, that the more important part, how to run tests, was handled in the Gradle templates Bobcat provides.

Bobcat BDD templates

From 2.1.0 version, Bobcat bobcat-bdd and bobcat-aem-bdd Gradle templates provide direct dependencies to the Cucumber, namely:

  • cucumber-java
  • cucumber-java8
  • cucumber-guice

Additionally, the following are set up/available to the users:

  • cucumber.properties that point to the Injector source, so the Bobcat Guice modules are initialized correctly
  • ScenarioContext - an object for transferring data between states; it follows the same concept as the world object in Ruby’s bindings of Cucumber
    • you can use it or create your own, more domain-specific object and scrape it
    • for more info, see this article
  • cucumber Gradle task, which is used for running the tests

Important notices:

  • we have forfeit using the cucumber-junit artifact in favor of the CLI runner provided by Cucumber - the JUnit integration is limited and still based on JUnit4
  • we highly recommend using the Cucumber for Java plugin in Intellij IDEA, as it will allow you to run your .feature files directly from the IDE - thanks to this and due to the above point, there’s no need to create additional runners right now!

In case you prefer to use the cucumber-junit approach - feel free to add the dependency and do it, Bobcat does not enforce anything from now on :).

Please refer to Cucumber’s official docs in terms of anything Cucumber-related: link

Migrating from previous versions (bb-cumber)

To follow the above approach, do the following:

  • ScenarioContext migration:
    1. copy the ScenarioContext to one of your packages in your codebase; you can grab it from here
    2. replace all your imports from import com.cognifide.qa.bb.scenario.ScenarioContext; to import <YOUR PACKAGE>.ScenarioContext;
  • replace the dependencies from bb-cumber to Cucumber’s artifacts: 
    def bobcatVersion = '2.0.3'
def cucumberVersion = '4.2.6'
  
//...
  
dependencies {
    compile group: 'com.cognifide.qa.bb', name: 'bb-core', version: bobcatVersion
    compile "io.cucumber:cucumber-java:$cucumberVersion"
    compile "io.cucumber:cucumber-java8:$cucumberVersion"
    compile "io.cucumber:cucumber-guice:$cucumberVersion"
}
  • add the following Gradle task and additional configurations: 
    def cucumberArgs = ['--plugin', 'pretty',
                    '--plugin', 'html:build/cucumber-html-report',
                    '--plugin', 'json:build/cucumber-json-report.json',
                    '--glue', 'testing.test',
                    'src/test/resources']
  
def profiles = [
        'firefox': 'firefox'
]
  
configurations {
    cucumberRuntime {
        extendsFrom testRuntime
    }
}
  
task cucumber() {
    def profile = System.getProperty('profile', 'default')
    if (!profile.equals('default')) {
        System.setProperty('bobcat.config.contexts', profile)
    }
  
    dependsOn assemble, compileJava, compileTestJava
    doLast {
        javaexec {
            main = "cucumber.api.cli.Main"
            classpath = configurations.cucumberRuntime + sourceSets.main.output + sourceSets.test.output
            args = cucumberArgs
            systemProperties = System.getProperties()
        }
    }
}
  • for Maven-based setups (older versions of Bobcat), please refer to Cucumber’s docs: link

Migrating @Transformer usage

If you have been using the @Transformer annotation in your Cucumber step definitions, you might encounter lots of errors. This is due to the fact that it got removed in favor of using a new approach which uses the TypeRegistryConfigurer.

For more details, see official docs.

Known limitations

  • There is no integration with Allure reporting engine, hence all the additional logging informations provided by Bobcat will not be present in Cucumber’s reports
  • Bobcumber runner (extension of Cucumber’s own runner) handled closing Bobcat’s WebDriverPool. In case you are re-using WebDriver instances (with webdriver.reusable=true property), you have to handle this on your own right now.