Getting Started with Gauge Acceptance Testing

I had a great TestTalks interview with Zabil Maliackal a product manager at Thoughtworks about acceptance testing and their open source framework Gauge.

You might be asking. Why another automation framework for acceptance test-driven development(ATDD)? Doesn’t tools like Cucumber handle this?

Yes and no.

BDD vs ATDD

BDD is great (and I love it) if you’re using for what it was designed for – communication. Not a bloated automation framework instead.

But in my experience, many teams skip the most valuable feature communication and go straight to the automation benefit.

That’s fine if it works for you.

Personally, I find this approach limited with too much overhead for little gain.

Gauge takes a different approach.

First, it’s for acceptance testing — emphases on the testing piece. So it focuses on testing not on collaboration among team members like with BDD.

As Zabil mentioned in our interview Gauges is not for solving communication issues within the team. He believes that's not what testing is for. Gage's for specifically solving testing issues related to testing.

After speaking with Zabil I thought I’d give Gauge a quick try.

Quick Getting Started with Gauge

I learn best my rolling up my sleeves and start trying things. So this is a quick intro on how to install and get started with Gauge and Selenium.

Also although I used Selenium in this example Gauge was developed to be a BYOT bring your own tool framework. So you can use Selenium, or you can use anything else for driving your tests.

For example, let's say you have a team developing API. And you need to write acceptance tests for API. Then you can use an API testing tool and plug that into a Gauge and have the same benefit. So it's not strictly selenium you can plug in any tool that you want.

Gauge commands used in this Getting Started Guide

• npm install -g npm@latest
• npm install -g @getgauge/cli
• gauge init Java
• gauge run specs

More Getting Started with Gauge Awesomeness

One of the sessions you’ll have access to this year at the online Automation Guild conference is a hands-on demo on How to Get Started Doing Cross-Browser Testing with Gauge and Selenium WebDriver presented by Prateek Baheti, a developer at ThoughtWorks.

Register now and get instant access to this must-see session as well as 25 other sessions revealing all kinds of ways to help you create automation awesomeness.