What is AC?

I‘d like to start using Cucumber in the context of domain driven design. My problem is that the initial design phase of projects never leaves space for this budget-wise. While I learned in engineering school that 10% of the project budget is to be allocated for an architectural prototype, the situation on our agency projects is completely different. It starts from selling the shiny thing and then underpinning the business logic in a move-fast-break-things manner. We are at least disciplined enough to have 100% unit-test coverage. But how do I make a proper argument for long-living domain logic tests which are readable for the business side and serve as a discussion base for business model design changes?

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Acceptance Criteria

We just do no other specs and use them as our manual acceptance test.

Do you outsource the programming work? Or are the Gherkin specs used in house?

In-house.

1. Are they written as end-to-end tests?

2. Let‘s say using Selenium?

3. What‘s the abstraction level in practice? Is it „when I click button X…“ or is it „when a salesperson creates a discounted offer“?

Please tell me when I ask to much.

Hey, no problem. I'm surprised to find someone interested in this topic. 😄

They're written as business scenarios and you can combine them into E2E tests. You can reuse one scenario like "login with valid customer profile" into lots of different E2E tests.

At my old company, we were using Behat. That was a couple years ago. It's based upon Gherkin and the parsers often use Mink (similar to Selenium) or something. But you can also

https://docs.behat.org/en/latest/

I know some java developers that were using Cucumber Open, I think:

https://cucumber.io/tools/cucumber-open/

I rediscovered my interest for BDD with the rise of ChatGPT. The long road to „AI“-supported coding must include good and executable specs somewhere, I believe. We‘ll be in an undebuggable mess otherwise.

What percent of project budget do you typically allocate to writing those business scenarios?

About 15%, probably, as you sometimes have to rewrite and you have to make sure that they all fit together.