Friday December 23, 2011

Zucchini: Promising Cucumber-like Front End for UI Automation

As we approach the holiday break, I found this little gem. Zucchini looks to be a Cucumber-like runner that acts as a front end to UI Automation. You write feature files in it’s own Gherkin-ish syntax and write your step definitions in CoffeeScript. Zucchini automatically compiles the CoffeeScript down into Javascript, invokes UI Automation, and generates much better organized output. It even automatically handles screenshots of the app for you in the final report.

I haven’t had a chance to dig into this myself, yet. It looks very promising and I like what I see when I glance through the code. And it looks like they’ve thought through a good continuous integration workflow.

I like the idea behind this, but I advise caution when piling up layers, upon layers of testing abstraction. Debugging these scripts still requires knowledge of UI Automation and may be more a hassle than it’s worth. Personally, I’m still looking for a means to invoke the UI Automation mechanism directly and do that from Ruby. But there’s good stuff to learn from in this project.

(via Deallocated Objects)