Declarative vs Imperative Gherkin Scenarios for Cucumber

Everybody I’ve met that is new to Gherkin starts with an Imperative style of scenarios. The Imperative approach is simple and intuitive and reflects what manual testers do. But I hate the Imperative style with a passion. I favour a Declarative style of scenarios not least because a declarative style means I can test business rules. The UI is prone to change but the business rules tend to be more stable.
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Developers don’t have time for code reviews and unit tests

The ticket moves to “Dev Done” but there are no unit tests and the code hasn’t been reviewed. When challenged the developer says “That’s because I don’t have time for that stuff”. If I hear that I want to know why they feel they don’t have time, then I give them the time.
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Whose responsibility is testing anyway?

I have a painfully small manual test team, sometimes 1 tester per 15 developers. The answer to the obvious question “who tests?” is “mostly the developers”. Of course this only works if you’re doing extensive automated testing including Specification by Example with a tool such as Cucumber.
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Avoid the Refactoring Branch of Doom

Sometimes I make mistakes. One of them was when I commissioned what I now affectionately call the Refactoring Branch of Doom. Doomed because it was never ending. The refactor was too big and, because it was done in a branch away from the main code base, the refactoring guys never caught up with the main development team. So I canned the doomed refactoring initiative and we did it a different way. One that worked.
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Cucumber: Who writes the Gherkin Scenarios

Gherkin, the language used in Cucumber to write tests, is meant to be understandable by folk from the business. I haven’t encountered product owners able to write their own scenarios. And I don’t trust either developers or testers to do it on their behalf. The only people I trust are business analysts trained to write and think Gherkin.
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