I read an article on the state of testing in Cocoa. The author, Alex Vollmer, paints a pretty dismal picture of BDD in Cocoa community and I’d have to agree with him. In my decision to use Ruby over Python for my web apps, I mentioned that BDD (Cucumber and RSpec) and the Ruby testing culture was a major reason I went with Ruby. I would really love to see that aspect come over to the Cocoa community. Alex believes that snobbery and elitism are dominant attitudes that prevent the community from adopting testing practices from other environments. I haven’t dealt with the Cocoa community at large, so I can’t comment on the snobbery and elitism, but I do know that XCode and the various Cocoa frameworks didn’t grow up in a BDD world and the fact that the community didn’t grow up with BDD, like Ruby and Rails, makes it a lot harder to inject.
I know there’s been some work to use Cucumber with the Simulator, but that requires you to drop out of Xcode. I’ve gone down this path before, I don’t want to switch between editors and shells for my development environment. I want to see Cucumber and RSpec equivalents that can be run from within XCode. For me, it was running those two in combination while going through The RSpec Book that was my aha moment for BDD and I think it would be the same for the entire Cocoa community.
