Cucumber Vs NoCodeBDD

I have been working with Behavior Driven Development (BDD) using Cucumber for several years. I am a huge fan of BDD and the benefits it brings to a project. I wouldn’t embark on a project without using BDD. The main benefits of using BDD is, it improves the collaboration between cross functional members of the team and reduces ambiguities in understanding requirements. The three amigos collaborate and write scenarios using real world example in natural language, which is understood by all members of the team, whether they are technical or not. These scenarios serves as a requirement specification.

Automation scripts can be written for these specifications to make sure the application behaves as per these agreed specifications i.e. hence the reason for calling them as executable specification. By automating these scenarios, every requirement is tested and at the same time the automation suite gets built . This serves as a regression pack which makes sure any new changes to the code doesn’t impact already delivered requirements.

To automate the scenarios, many organisations use Cucumber or some type of script based tool to implement the automation. However, though writing scripts/code to automate BDDs is a great way, it does take considerable amount of time. Any automation code that is written also has to be maintained. Creation and maintenance of automation code takes considerable amount of time.

This is where NoCodeBDD significantly differs from Cucumber. Using NoCodeBDD, users don’t have to write any code or script. All they have to do is, provide the required details and NoCodeBDD will take care of automation.

We did a comparison study between NoCodeBDD and Cucumber. For this study, we took a simple scenario to write a BDD and automate it. For the purpose of this test, we used a REST API. When it comes to writing the code to automate the scenario using Cucumber, we also created any generic code, which has to be created only once and can be reused before comparing and time taken to write those reusable code is not included. The result of the comparison is astonishing. It took about 5 minutes to write a Feature and automate it using NoCodeBDD and took about 55 minutes to write the Feature and to automate using Cucumber.

Following GIF shows how the scenario is created and automated using NoCodeBDD and a timer is shown next to it:

Following GIF shows how the scenario is created and automated using Cucumber and a timer is shown next to it. For the sake of brevity, we have used time lapsed the GIF. However you can see the complete video by clicking the link

If you are interested in seeing the whole video, you can follow it by clicking this link

NoCodeBDD was born out of frustration in spending considerable amount of time in writing scripts to automate BDD. Our mission is to reduce the time taken to automate BDDs at least by 10x so the teams could spend more time on collaboration and solving business issues.