What is the difference between Gherkin and Cucumber software?

What is Cucumber?

It is an open-source software tool that makes the strategic use of the Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework for the purpose of writing automated acceptance tests. Test cases in Cucumber are written using the Gherkin language. Originally, cucumber was written in Ruby, but, eventually, it has been able to support various popular programming languages such as .Net, Python, JavaScript and Java.

 

The importance of Behavior Driven Development (BDD):

BDD is an agile software development model that has been specifically designed to leverage collaboration between testers, developers and business managers. It is a part of data-driven development and basically focuses on rethinking the approach to acceptance testing and unit testing. 

 

The principles of BDD are as follows:

·       A test is defined for the unit

·       Then the tests are made to fail

·       Then after the unit is implemented and

·       finally, the implementation of the unit is verified to know whether it makes the tests succeed.

 

What is Gherkin?

It is considered to be Cucumber's language parser through which software behaviors are allowed to be specified in a logical and plain language that can be easily understood by people. Business-facing text is the form in which cucumber feature documentation is written. This text is human-readable and non-technical for stakeholders like managers and business analysts. The natural language syntax of Gherkin is designed so that the documentation of the code under test is easily understandable.

 

The working of Gherkin:

Step definitions are created by Gherkin through which Gherkin steps are connected to the code. Keywords are also supported by Gherkin in different languages. Following is a basic structure of Gherkin:

• Cucumber tests are separated into 'features', which are basically use cases through which a specific function being tested is described
  
  
• These features are further separated into 'Scenarios' through which a flow of events is described. Features may often have multiple scenarios

A series of 'steps' are used to define scenarios, which describe the flow of actions and preconditions.