Early Cucumber impressions
I've used Cucumber a few times before. For one, I coded the Mastermind puzzle in the RSpec book, adding a few extra features for my own game-playing edification. This was done initially in the service of an assignment and became a learning exercise.
Secondly, in my first venture into pair programming, we used Cucumber to drive out some features of a Rails project I am working on. I had already set up a few scenarios, but they were basically languishing until this pairing session. It was a pretty smooth session: not only were the features easy (essentially basic CRUD and view logic), but my partner was an expert at Cucumber, quickly pointing out a bunch of time-saving features like tags and inline tables to pass data. Learning from doing, with someone else, is so much more thorough than learning from a book. Also, since I'm a one-key aliasing fetishist, we set up aliases to run the features: u for all the features; and f for those tagged @focus. I love that. The session made Cucumber feel intuitive and easy to use.
But, still. It's a new framework and new to me and I'm still in the slog-through phase -- "getting" some of it and furrowing my brow at other parts. As well as having a bunch of opinions and an earful of opinions from other users on both sides of the fence. So I've decided to use it this week to drive out a rewrite of the authentication process on an existing site. I am also using it for as-yet unwritten features on a new app. So as I start the process, I thought I'd write down some of my existing impressions, and then track how they change (if they do) during the next week or so.
