Mastering Advanced BDD Automation with WebdriverIO, JavaScript, and Cucumber

In today’s fast development environment, effective communication among developers, testers, and stakeholders is the need of the hour. Cucumber BDD in JavaScript, by bridging the technical and non-technical team members, provides a powerful solution for the same. Writing tests in a natural, human-readable language helps everyone understand the behavior of the application from a business perspective.

We’ll talk in this blog about implementing Cucumber BDD in JavaScript and help you write clean, understandable test cases that reflect real-life user behavior. This would help set up your environment from scratch, creating feature files and executing them to incorporate BDD into your workflow on test automation using JavaScript. Get ready to learn how Cucumber BDD in JavaScript can improve collaboration, increase test coverage, and make your testing process more efficient!

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Cucumber with JavaScript

For Overview of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) ,Cucumber Basics and Setting Up the Environment You can refer our blog Cucumber BDD in JavaScript

How JavaScript Integrates with Cucumber?
JavaScript is another language that can be used in writing Cucumber tests, giving JavaScript developers a chance to utilize the capability of BDD offered by Cucumber. Cucumber-JS is one implementation of Cucumber in the JavaScript environment where one may write, run, and manage BDD tests.

Basic Steps to Integrate JavaScript with Cucumber

• Writing Features in Gherkin: In the first step, the feature files are written with Gherkin syntax. The behavior of the system is described in plain English (or another natural language).
• Step Definitions: Once a feature is written, JavaScript step definitions are developed to map Gherkin steps to actual JavaScript code implementing the actions. For example, given that a feature had the following
• step: Given I am on the homepage, this would have corresponding JavaScript in the step definition file that implements action to get to the home page.
• Running the Tests: Once Gherkin features and JavaScript step definitions are created, Cucumber-JS executes the tests by running a scenario in the feature file and then matching those up with the corresponding step definition in JavaScript.
• Assertions: Finally, the step definitions validate their expected behaviour using JavaScript assertions – usually with libraries such as Chai or Jest.

Here’s an example of how Cucumber integrates with JavaScript.

Feature File (login.feature):

Step Definitions (loginSteps.js):

In this example:

• Gherkin defines the behavior in a human-readable format.
• JavaScript provides the actual test steps in loginSteps.js, where the step definitions map to functions that interact with the application.
• Chai assertions are used to verify that the test behaves as expected.

Why Use Cucumber with JavaScript?

• Seamless Integration with Web and Mobile Testing Frameworks: JavaScript is the language of choice for web applications testing with Selenium, WebDriverIO, or Cypress. For mobile applications testing, Appium supports the language as well. So, the combination of Cucumber with JavaScript lets teams leverage the strength of BDD and the flexibility of the chosen testing frameworks to easily write, maintain, and execute acceptance tests.
• By writing tests in Gherkin: you are actually creating readable and maintainable specifications for your system’s behavior. This will make sure that anyone can understand the business requirements irrespective of their technical expertise and then verify that the application really meets them.
• Unified Testing Approach: Cucumber-JS helps in unifying your testing approach by allowing frontend JavaScript-based tests and backend Node.js testing in one language, thus eliminating the context-switching between different languages and tools.
• Collaboration among Stakeholders: Another strength of Cucumber is that it engages business analysts, testers, and developers in testing. Gherkin language makes writing tests quite easy, and therefore involving stakeholders in the development process ensures that the software does exactly what is expected of it by business stakeholders.
• Cross-Platform Testing: Since Cucumber is a platform-agnostic tool, it can be used in conjunction with various testing frameworks for web applications (Selenium, Cypress) and mobile applications (Appium).

Writing Your First Cucumber Feature File
This tool supports BDD and writes tests in plain language for its users to read and be clearly understood both by technical as well as non-technical stakeholders. Cucumber test code is in Gherkin, the language which will describe test cases in specific syntax in the.feature file format.

This guide walks through the process of creating your first Cucumber feature file. You will see how to start with a basic example with Given, When, and Then steps as well as how to write tests in Gherkin.

Creating.feature Files

A feature file is a very simple text file with a .feature extension containing your test written in Gherkin syntax. The feature file describes a feature – typically a high-level description of the functionality – and all the scenarios that would point out how the feature should behave.

Here’s how to structure the .feature file:

• Feature: Describes the feature being tested.
• Scenario: Describes a specific situation or behavior within that feature.
• Given: A precondition or setup for the test.
• When: The action that takes place.
• Then: The expected outcome or result.
• And/But: Used to extend Given, When, and Then steps with more conditions.

Example of a Simple Feature File

This feature file is written in Gherkin syntax and describes the behaviour of a user logging into a website with valid credentials.

Scenario with Given, When, Then Steps

Let’s break down the structure of a Gherkin scenario:

Given: This step sets up the initial state of the system.

• It describes the conditions before the user performs any action.
• Example: “Given the user is on the login page”

When: This step describes the action the user performs.

• It defines what happens in response to the user’s actions.
• Example: “When the user enters a valid username and password”

Then: This step describes the expected outcome or result of the action

• It specifies what the system should do after the action is performed.
• Example: “Then the user should be redirected to the homepage”

You can also use And and But to group multiple conditions together within a single step:

In this example, And is used to add more steps in the “When” and “Then” sections.

Understanding Feature File Structure
A typical feature file structure consists of several key components:

Feature: The name of the feature you’re testing.

• This can be followed by a short description of the feature.
• Example: Feature: User Login and then a brief description of what this feature entails.

Scenario: Each scenario represents a specific test case or use case. This is the “test” part of the BDD scenario.

• It provides specific examples of how the feature should work.

Steps: Steps are defined using the keywords Given, When, Then, And, and But, and explain the behavior of what is happening, or should happen.

Here’s an extended example with multiple scenarios and steps:

Connecting Cucumber with JavaScript
You can write your automated acceptance tests in an almost human-readable format when using Gherkin for expressing Cucumber. In this regard, you would typically pair these tests with JavaScript’s step definitions to run those tests in JavaScript.. In this section, we will walk through how to connect Cucumber with JavaScript, create step definitions, map Gherkin steps to JavaScript functions, and handle asynchronous actions using async/await.

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