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That strategy has worked since, at least, COBOL. I don't see the strategy breaking any time soon.
by pjmorris 9y ago
That strategy has worked since, at least, COBOL. I don't see the strategy breaking any time soon.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoIndeed, the original design goal of COBOL was to make professional programmers unnecessary. That rather spectacularly failed to work.
- himom 9y agoI think the same can be applied to Cucumber testing: having to write “natural language” tests in one area and then a bunch more code to interpret that dialect. Why not express tests directly in code like everyone else instead of pretending business people will ever write them, understand them or know their limitations? Cuke seems like extra busywork job security rather than GTD.
- pjmorris 9y agoDespite plenty of experience to the contrary, I'm still a believer that there's some way to disentangle what needs to be done from how it needs to be done. I do think the business people have to understand what they're asking for, and how to tell whether they've got it. I don't think many of them are going to learn code to do it. Maybe there are documents out there, somewhere, that unambiguously describe what business people want and whether they've gotten it, but until I see those mythical creatures, I'm willing to cut Cuke some slack.
- crdoconnor 9y agoCucumber did get one idea right though - enforcing a separation of concerns between a high level non-turing complete specification and turing complete code that executes it. Gherkin just isn't a great language to demonstrate the benefits of that.