Behavior-driven development guides — write tests in plain English with Cucumber, Gherkin, and Robot Framework.
Python
Behave and the Python requests library are a natural pairing for API testing. You write scenarios in plain Gherkin that non-developers can read, while step definitions handle the HTTP calls. This post walks through project setup, reusable context objects, authentication flows, and error-case testing — all with working code.
Testing
Cucumber is often pitched as "better JUnit" — more readable, closer to requirements, collaborative. That framing is wrong. Cucumber and JUnit aren't alternatives to each other; they serve different purposes and most teams need both. The real question isn't "Cucumber or JUnit?" It&
Testing
A Cucumber test suite with 200 scenarios running sequentially might take 10-15 minutes. That's too long for a feedback loop during development and an obstacle in CI pipelines. Parallel execution can cut that to 2-4 minutes, but it requires making your tests thread-safe. This guide
Testing
Three frameworks dominate the Java BDD landscape: Cucumber-JVM, JBehave, and Serenity BDD. All three let you write acceptance tests in a business-readable format and map them to Java glue code. Beyond that surface similarity, they make very different trade-offs. Picking the wrong one costs you months of
Testing
Cucumber-JVM brings Behaviour-Driven Development to the JVM. Combined with Spring Boot, it gives you executable specifications that run against a real (or sliced) application context. This guide covers everything from zero to a working BDD suite: dependency setup, Spring integration, writing your first feature file, defining steps, and
Testing
A Cucumber suite that takes 20 minutes to run is a suite developers skip. Parallel execution cuts that time proportionally to the number of available cores — a suite that ran sequentially in 20 minutes can finish in 4 minutes on a 6-core machine. But parallelism also exposes shared state
Testing
Cucumber-JVM scenarios often span multiple step definition classes. A login step puts a session token somewhere. A checkout step needs that token. A verification step needs the order ID that checkout returned. Without a deliberate state-sharing strategy, you end up with static fields, thread-local hacks, or a
Testing
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a way of writing tests that describes system behavior in plain language that both technical and non-technical team members can read and understand. Cucumber is the most widely-used tool for this in the Java ecosystem — it runs tests written in Gherkin syntax (Given/
Testing
Cucumber is easy to start with and surprisingly hard to do well. The gap between a Cucumber test suite that helps the team and one that becomes a maintenance burden comes down to a handful of decisions about how you write Gherkin and structure step definitions. This guide focuses on
BDD
Concordion is a Java testing framework that turns plain-English specifications into executable acceptance tests. Unlike Cucumber's Gherkin syntax, Concordion embeds test instrumentation directly into HTML documents — the same documents your product team writes. The result is specifications that can be run as tests without any transformation. What
Python
pytest-BDD supports three layers of data-driven testing: Scenario Outlines in feature files, @pytest.mark.parametrize on scenario functions, and params on fixtures. Understanding when to use each — and how to combine them — is the key to eliminating test duplication without sacrificing readability. Key Takeaways * Scenario Outlines belong in
Tools & Frameworks
pytest-bdd brings Behavior-Driven Development to Python by letting you write plain-English Gherkin scenarios and execute them with the pytest runner. It integrates natively with pytest fixtures, parametrize, and plugins, making BDD a first-class citizen in any Python test suite. Key Takeaways pytest-bdd runs on top