2 posts tagged with "testing"

I've been writing acceptance tests on the JVM since 2009. Concordion first, then Cucumber on the teams around me, then Yatspec, and eventually I wrote my own.

Yatspec's trick was that it read the test method itself. You wrote:

given(orchestration.sends(anOrder));

and the report showed:

Given orchestration sends an order

No feature file, no step definitions, no glue. The test was the sentence.

That's the idea I've been chasing ever since, and it's why I wrote Kensa. So this is a biased guide. It's also a short one.

If you've ever set up Cucumber on a JVM project, you know the overhead: feature files, step definitions, the glue code that ties them together, and the constant friction of keeping all three in sync as your codebase evolves. The promise — shared, readable specifications — rarely survives contact with a real team.

Kensa takes a different approach. Write your Given-When-Then tests directly in Kotlin or Java. No Gherkin. No step definitions. No separate files to maintain.