Question

What do you prefer RSpec or Cucumber

Answer 1

I highly recommend picking up The RSpec Book, published by Pragmatic Programmers [http://pragprog.com/book/achbd/the-rspec-book]. It discusses both RSpec and Cucumber: when and how to use both of them. They actually work well together, and complement each other in many ways.

For me, RSpec is the way I like to perform unit and functional testing, while Cucumber, with the Gherkin language, seems ideal for describing and testing the larger elements of the application, and are quite well suited to documenting stories as one does in Agile development, and implementing them to provide acceptance tests for features and releases. Cucumber is useful also to drive external testing of web applications via Capybara or Watir, and also for driving command line tools via Aruba.

Answer 2

My rule of thumb : Cucumber for integration testing ( output = documentation of features ) and RSpec for unit testing ( output = documentation of code )

Answer 3

I know a lot people may disagree, but I believe that using Cucumber is counterproductive as writing plain English text and then parsing it with regular expressions is somewhat overkill and error prone. I think anyone should use Cucumber only if they have a strong reason to.