Autotest Integration

Cucumber comes with an autotest plugin that will hook into the regular autotest cycle to run the features after the tests/specs. The plugin is disabled by default but can be turned on by setting the AUTOFEATURE environment variable to ‘true’. For example:

$ AUTOFEATURE=true autospec

If you always want to have the plugin run then you can export the variable in your .bash_profile or other shell file like so:

export AUTOFEATURE=true

Why is it disabled by default?

Autotest is geared toward the Red→Green→Refactor cycle on an object level (unit-tests.) These object level specs/tests are generally highly focused and isolated per object so breaks can be detected on a very detailed level. The suites are meant to run extremely fast to give the developer quick feedback. Cucumber on the other hand provides end-to-end application level testing. By executing the entire stack features can help find integration failures between objects and provide large coverage to prevent regressions. A side effect of this is that features are generally much slower than object level specs. Due to their relative slowness and non-focused nature they may not be realistic to run along side the object-level suite. Of course every project is different and every developer has different workflow preferences.