226: Acceptance Testing Using Gauge with Zabil Maliackal

In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking with Zabil Maliackal, Gauge Product Manager at ThoughtWorks, about acceptance testing. If you’re looking for an open-source automation framework that requires less code and less maintenance, and want to focus more of your efforts on the acceptance piece of testing, you don’t want to miss this episode.

About Zabil Maliackal

Zabil is a product manager for Gauge and loves creating open source software to improve software delivery and quality.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• The best example of adopting good practices is following the test pyramid and figuring out where to write your test and what test to write. Many times people overdo their test cases or focus a lot on functional test cases when writing test cases at the right layer matters.
• There’s a nice article on Martin Fowler’s blog about the different kind of tests and if you know that you have these kinds of tests that’s when you know that you have a healthy test suite.
• Normally what we’ve seen as acceptance tests are really hard to maintain especially to read. And they run slow. And then it takes a lot of time to figure out what’s wrong when your acceptance test suite fails. And so Gauge tries to solve these problems by one writing acceptance tests in a markdown so that they are readable. And when something fails you know exactly what failed and why it failed. Most importantly it does that in a way that it removes a lot of code.
• If you look at many of the literature that BDD and articles about BDD especially you know if you go to the cucumber blogs they say BDD is not about testing. And they go as far as to say BDD /Cucumber is probably the most misunderstood tool.
• Gauge has a different approach it treats acceptance testing as acceptance testing it’s focused on testing it’s not focused on collaboration among team members like what BDD does.
• It’s kind of easy to install Gauge because it’s a single binary you can you can just download the binary and unzip it and then get running with it. I do recommend that you download our plugin for Visual Studio code. Visual Studio Code is a great editor and Gauge integrates extremely well with Visual Studio code. And if you use a javascript plugin it’ll be quite easy for you to get started and experiment and understand the concept of Gauge.

Connect with Zabil Maliackal

• Twitter: @getgauge
• Github: gauge.org
• Company: Gauge
• LinkedIn: zabil-cheriya-maliackal

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