cucumber / cucumber/common

Excel -> Pickles: Bring back FIT!

Open
#775 8 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
:safety_pin: pinned :zap: enhancement milestone-proposal platform consolidation
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
3.4k
Forks
679
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

For some calculation-heavy domains (such as finance), Excel is the tool of choice for domain experts. Ward Cunningham knew this when he designed [FIT](http://fit.c2.com/).

I want to resurrect a FIT-like experience in Cucumber:

* Domain experts write tables
* Programmers write glue code

The question is - how will this glue code look? I'm not sure the familiar step definition abstraction fits here (no pun intended). The [fixture](http://fit.c2.com/wiki.cgi?FieldGuideToFixtures) model might be just what we want.

An Excel sheet plus fixtures would be translated to pickles, and from there on Cucumber would just run the pickles. I'm not sure how well the formatter abstractions would fit :-)

What's the simplest thing we could do as an experiment?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked FIT fixture model and Cucumber's pickle and formatter abstractions. Define the smallest experiment that accepts an Excel table plus fixtures, translates it to pickles, and runs those pickles; done means the experiment demonstrates this flow and clarifies how the glue code should look.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
testing
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.