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+++
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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Gherkin Is Your Friend to Understand Expectations"
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date = 2019-06-19
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["en-au", "book", "things i learnt", "gherkin", "expectations"]
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+++
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Gherkin is file format for writing behaviour tests. But it can also give you
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some insights on what you should do.
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<!-- more -->
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Alright, let's talk a bit about Gherkin:
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[Gherkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucumber_(software)#Gherkin_language)
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is a file format created for [Cucumber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucumber_(software)),
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which describes scenarios, what's in them, what actions the user/system will
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do and what's expected after those actions, in a very high level, so people
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without programming experience can describe what's expected from the system.
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Although Gherkin was born with Cucumber, it is now supported by a bunch of
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programming languages, through external libraries.
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A typical Gherkin file may look something like this:
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* **Given that** _initial system environment_
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* **When** _action performed by the user or some external system_
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* **Then** _expected system environment_
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Or, in a more concrete example:
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* **Given that** The system is retrieving all tweets favourited by the user
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* **When** It finds a tweet with an attachment
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* **Then** The attachment should be saved along the tweet text
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Pretty simple, right?
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Now, why I'm mentioning this?
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Sometimes, specs are not the most clear source of information about what it is
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expected from the system. If you're confused about what you should write,
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asking the person responsible for the request to write something like Gherkin
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may give you some better insights about it.
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Obviously, it won't be complete. People tend to forget the error situations --
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people entering just numbers on names, letter in age fields, tweets with no
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text and just attachments -- but at least with a Gherkin description of the
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system, you can get a better picture of the whole.
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Also, you may not like to write specs. That's alright, you can replace them
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with Gherkin anyway.
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{{ chapters(prev_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/steps-as-comments", prev_chapter_title="Write Steps as Comments", next_chapter_link="/books/things-i-learnt/integration-tests", next_chapter_title="Unit Tests Are Good, Integration Tests Are Gooder") }}
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