Load Cucumber tests in Studio

[jennifer-shehane]

What would you like?

When loading cucumber tests into Cypress (that use cucumber plugin), we are unable to load the currect specfile code into Studio

Why is this needed?

Would like some way to support Cucumber tests within Studio.

Other

No response

[shuskey]

From shuskey at zerofox.com

Proposal: Native support for Gherkin in Cypress Studio

Our company has invested in Behavioral-Driven Development (BDD) style test development, which leads us to very readable test scenarios that many people can engage with across our entire team.
I would like to see Cypress Studio add native support for the Gherkin preprocessor, enabling Gherkin steps to be treated as first-class citizens within the Studio's debugging environment. In other words, while debugging, it should be possible to step over a Gherkin step or step into it, just like a standard debugger allows you to step over or step into functions.
For example, it would natively support a Gherkin test like:

  Scenario: Navigate to the page and check content loads properly
    Given the user is on the Attack Surface page
    When the user clicks on the "manage seeds" button
    Then the page should be redirected to the "manage_seeds" page
    And a table should appear containing the current seeds the customer has

Each line of gherkin represents a function call to a set of cypress calls.

Our specific implementation of this preprocessor uses Cucumber, and Cucumber gives additional levels of organization and benefits to us, namely:

• Page Object file (PO.ts): Encapsulates page elements and user interactions.
• Selectors file (Selector.ts): Centralizes element locators.
• Steps file (Steps.ts): Implements the actual Gherkin steps with Cypress commands.

Proposal: Extending Cypress Studio with cy.gherkin.prompt

Overview
I believe there is an opportunity here, by not only supporting Gherkin steps, but also extending the concept of cy.prompt into a new cy.gherkin.prompt, you can achieve a deeper integration. This would allow Cypress Studio not only to interpret these high-level steps but also to use LLM-driven prompts to dynamically generate or adapt the underlying Cypress code.

Key Concepts

1. Aligning with BDD and Gherkin Steps:
   This extension would allow Cypress Studio to fully understand and integrate Gherkin-style Given-When-Then steps. Instead of just treating these steps as static text, cy.gherkin.prompt would serve as a layer that interprets these steps and connects them to underlying Cypress commands.
2. Utilizing LLM-Powered Assistance:
   Just as cy.prompt uses large language model (LLM) technology to convert high-level prompts into low-level Cypress calls, cy.gherkin.prompt would do the same but specifically for Gherkin steps. This means that if a Given-When-Then step is defined but doesn't yet have an implementation, cy.gherkin.prompt could dynamically generate or link that step to the appropriate Cypress code using LLM capabilities.
3. Supporting Self-Healing and Regeneration:
   Cypress already prides itself on self-healing features, where it can regenerate code if a test fails due to minor changes. By extending this to cy.gherkin.prompt, the Studio could regenerate or adapt Gherkin steps on the fly, keeping both the high-level scenarios and the underlying code in sync.
4. Supporting Non-Prompt Gherkin
   And because teams may have handcrafted a Gherkin function and do not want “large language model prompting” to get engaged in self-healing it, you should also support a non-prompt version, namely cy.gherkin.

Conclusion

In conclusion, by introducing cy.gherkin.prompt, Cypress Studio would not only embrace Gherkin-based BDD more fully, but also provide a seamless way for teams to benefit from LLM-powered code generation and self-healing at the Gherkin step level. This would make the Studio even more powerful, intuitive, and adaptable to modern testing workflows.
Beyond this, supporting the other levels of organization that the Cucumber preprocessor offers (Page object file, selectors file, and steps file) are up for debate. But from my perspective would definitely add value.

Example of cy.gherkin.prompt in action:

describe('Attack Surface easm', () => {
  it('Navigate to the page and check content loads properly', () => {
    cy.gherkin.prompt("Given the user is on the Attack Surface page");
    cy.gherkin.prompt("When the user clicks on the ‘manage seeds’ button");
    cy.gherkin.prompt("Then the page should be redirected to the ‘manage seeds’ page");
    cy.gherkin.prompt("And a table should appear containing the current seeds the customer has");
  });
});