Executable specification - the whole stack or not
September 26, 2011
This is really an age-old BDD question that pops up from time to time. Just now I got a question from an ex-colleague about it. A bit rephrased it something like this:
Should I test through the GUI all the way down to the database? How do you handle test-data in and test executing speed in those cases?
Many of us first got exposed to BDD tests through web applications and the way that we could test through the actual web page. We use tools like Watin, Selenium and other automation tools to accomplish that. We structure our automation code with page wrappers to get manageable automation code that can be re-used in our step definitions. For some BDD even implies automation (which is not at all the case).
On the “other” side we try to go through the whole stack and go through all the...