Capybara that is cucumber-like

From what I understood this morning, the concern Steve had was to be able to use the acceptance specs as a communication tool with the clients, whether directly (the clients read it) or indirectly (the clients do not read it).

The concern from me (at least) is the maintainability of the Cucumber steps. Here are some example:

Projects where there were so many cucumber steps that it became hard to figure out what each step did
Projects that tried to be too DRY with the steps the regexps became difficult to handle
Projects where a lot of set up was required, and the steps to create the users like became long and too descriptive (Given an active user exists that last logged in 2 years ago)
Projects whose Cuke steps shared World-wide variables (@project) that were used across steps

For me, using Capybara directly solves this. But, I must agree that only developers can read them. Why not have the best of both worlds?

Given this rspec file:

feature 'User can disable their own account' do

  background do
    given 'a user Bob exists' do
      @user = FactoryGirl.build_stubbed(:activated_user,
                                        username: 'Bob')
    end
  end

  scenario 'Disables own account' do
    given 'I am logged in as Bob' do
      sign_in_as @user
    end

    when 'I go to my account page' do
      visit account_path(@user)
    end

    when 'I click on the button to disable my account' do
      click_button 'Disable my account'
    end

    then 'I should see the message that I am logged out' do
      within '.flash-messages' do
        should_see 'You have been logged out. We will miss you.'
      end
    end
  end

end

The output would contain something like this:

Given I am logged in as Bob
When I go to my account page
And I click on the button to disable my account
Then I should see the message that I am logged out
  expected page to contain 'You have been logged out. We will miss you.' but
  it did not

ramontayag/gist:4064226

padi commented Nov 14, 2012