How to identify the intent of a confusing scenario?
The next challenge is going to be a bit more open-ended than usual.
When faced with a confusing scenario written in Gherkin, how would you engage the other members of the team to understand the intent?
A reader sent us the scenario below to illustrate this challenge. We’re looking for practical tips and tricks that people in a similar situation could use to understand what’s going on, before trying to rewrite this into something more sensible.
Here is the challenge
Scenario Outline: Should display a balance, account, account type, and name for each recipient for account
Given User sets language as English
When User goes to the account selection page
And Should navigate to login for plan for <cardsize>
And User logins into account for <user>
And User closes dashboard popup
Then Should display a recipient name with a balance, masked account, and account type
Examples:
| user | cardsize |
| user5 | full cards |
| user6 | reduced cards |Solving: How to identify the intent of a confusing scenario?
The challenge was to propose ways of engaging team members to understand the intent of a bad Gherkin script. To provide an expert view, we asked Janet Gregory to respond to the challenge and summarise the community answers. Janet is the co-author of fabulous Agile Testing books, and one of the leading voices in the software testing community.
You can read Janet’s response directly at her blog.
