Manual Testing With Cucumber's Ask Method

It's been a while since my last post.  I was actually working on a project where I had to do manual testing.  The cost of automating functional tests for the project did not provide any real advantage considering the tight schedule.  It did allow me to revisit a method in cucumber that I never thought I would ever use.

The ask method will pause the cucumber runtime and prompt the user for an input.  So, if I had the following step:

Given I am on the Nouvola Homepage

The ask method could be added to the step definition like this:

Given(/^I am on the Nouvola Homepage$/) do
  question = "Does the following home page open in the browser, http://www.nouvola.com?"
  answer = ask(question).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
end

If you just tried to run the above code, you will most like have received an error.

    Given I am on the Nouvola Homepage # features/step_definitions/steps.rb:1
      Does the following home page open in the browser, http://www.nouvola.com?
      yes
      
      expected: "yes"
           got: "yes\n"
      
      (compared using ==)
       (RSpec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError)
      ./features/step_definitions/steps.rb:4:in `/^I am on the Nouvola Homepage$/'
      features/nouvola.feature:4:in `Given I am on the Nouvola Homepage'

This can be easily fixed by adding a chomp to the end of code.

Given(/^I am on the Nouvola Homepage$/) do
  question = "Does the following home page open in the browser, http://www.nouvola.com?"
  answer = ask(question).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
end

Now with the ask method, I can “fully” document my scenario.

Feature:  As A User, I would like to view my Nouvola Dashboard

Scenario:  I should see my dashboard when I log in

Given I am on the Nouvola Homepage
When I log into my account
Then I see my dashboard

And my code looks like this:

Given(/^I am on the Nouvola Homepage$/) do
  question = "Does the following home page open in the browser, http://www.nouvola.com?"
  answer = ask(question).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
end

When(/^I log into my account$/) do
  question1 = "When you click 'Login' from the top menu, are you taken to the login page?"
  question2 = "Are you able to enter your log in credentials and click on 'LOG IN' button?"
  answer = ask(question1).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
  answer = ask(question2).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
end

Then(/^I see my dashboard$/) do
  question = "Do you see your dashboard?"
  answer = ask(question).chomp
  expect(answer).to eq "yes"
end

Of course, this approach can easily get out of hand.  In the next post, I'll demonstrate how I currently manage my manual steps.