Fitnesse Vs Cucumber

[Naveen Verma]

Hi,

We are weighing or options to decide between Cucumber and Fitnesse.

I searched the internet to find out the advantages of one over other but could not get anything.

Can you please throw some light as why I should choose Cucumber over Fitnesse. 

Views on this will be appreciated.

thanks,

-nav

[George Dinwiddie]

Nav,

On 6/4/14, 7:53 AM, Naveen Verma wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are weighing or options to decide between Cucumber and Fitnesse.
>
> I searched the internet to find out the advantages of one over other but
> could not get anything.

That's because it's a decision that depends much more on the people
using the tool than on any technical limitation. These are tools for
collaboration. I suggest trying both with the people who will be doing
the collaboration, i.e., the Three Amigos.

>
> Can you please throw some light as why I should choose Cucumber over
> Fitnesse.

A few differences:

Cucumber uses a text editor to enter and modify scenarios. Fitnesse uses
a web browser to edit a wiki. I find the text editor easier. Some people
use IDE plugins to edit the wiki pages directly, without having to do it
through a web form. All of these ways are somewhat foreign to most
business people.

I find it easier to organize and version-control text files than wiki
pages. I tried a version-control plugin for Fitnesse, but it wasn't
fully baked for SVN at the time.

Last time I used Fitnesse, I ran into issues with simultaneous editing.

Fitnesse gives a nice GUI for business people to run the tests and
examine the results. You'll likely have to be careful about simultaneous
use here, too. Of course, if you run Cucumber tests simultaneously on
the same system, you may run into conflicts there, too. Tests are rarely
written to guard against such.

Cucumber is more oriented toward batch runs, but can give a nice HTML
report of the results. You can even watch this as it's running.
Generally I run Cucumber under Jenkins to give easy web access to
kicking off a test run and seeing the results.

Try them both and see what you think.

- George

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
* George Dinwiddie * http://blog.gdinwiddie.com
Software Development http://www.idiacomputing.com
Consultant and Coach http://www.agilemaryland.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[Manuel Pais]

Cucumber is more oriented toward batch runs, but can give a nice HTML
report of the results. You can even watch this as it's running.
Generally I run Cucumber under Jenkins to give easy web access to
kicking off a test run and seeing the results.

Also the type of SUT can be important: Fitnesse is prob better for data-intensive systems (like complex financial calculations) due to its tabular format, while Cucumber is prob better for workflow-intensive systems due to the "free" text approach.

As George said, both can be used for collaboration but you should consider also what your non-technical people prefer. 

Manuel

[Richard Lawrence]

Years ago, I was mostly teaching Cucumber to Ruby and Java teams and Fitnesse to .NET teams—those were the best options at the time. I began noticing a pattern: The teams using Cucumber wrote less code to connect specs to automation and had better collaboration and more expressive specs. I looked into this for a while and concluded that several things about Cucumber accounted for this difference, so I worked with a few other people to write Cuke4Nuke, the first .NET Cucumber (since retired in favor of SpecFlow). 

Looking back, here are a few things I think made Cucumber better:

1. The basic architecture, where every step definition is global and connected to steps by simple regular expressions, forces the development of a precise language to describe system behavior while allowing for just enough of the natural flexibility of human language.

2. The Given/When/Then scenario structure seems to be a good fit for clearly describing most examples of system behavior. I found the most expressive part of Fitnesse to be ColumnFixture. For apps where the variations in data matter more than the structure of the examples, ColumnFixture is better than Cucumber’s Scenario Outlines. But most parts of most systems turn out not to be best described this way. I use Scenario Outlines much less than I expected to.

3. While the promise of collaborative editing with Fitnesse’s wiki is great, the actual experience of having plain text Cucumber features and step definitions versioned alongside production code is much better. With Cucumber Pro coming, we'll get the best of both.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t used Fitnesse on a real project since 2010, so I’m sure things have changed.)

Hope that helps,

Richard 

--
Posting rules: http://cukes.info/posting-rules.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cukes" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cukes+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[homa shahrokhi]

Hello Richard,

I am  new to Cucumber and in general in automation and been  a manual QA for more than 10 years.

Could you pls let me know where and ho can I start learning Cucumber.

I did install the Cucumber/Ruby  however not sure what would be the next step :( .

thanks ..Homa

[Richard Lawrence]

https://cucumber.io/ is a good starting point, with docs, online courses, links to books, and training.

Richard