When I was learning to write acceptance tests with Cucumber everything started with “I”. It made sense because you were driving a browser to click buttons and fill in forms and that’s what “you” did. However, I recently realized this doesn’t work when writing tests that require multiple users to interact with the same test. Instead acceptance tests should be written in third person as instructions of what should be done.

Let’s say we are building a trading site where two users can offer a price for an item that can be accepted or rejected. If we wrote this in first person our cucumber feature might look like the following.

Feature: offer price
  Scenario: accept offer price
    Given I offer a price of "5.75"
    When the price is accepted
    Then I should be able to send payment

When reading this test we have to assume the test will be run as the buyer in this case because we are offering a price for a product and then sending the payment. We also have to assume the action is being done by the seller outside this test as it would be unexpected for the test to log in as the seller to accept the offer price.

If we write this test in third person it becomes much clearer as to who is performing which action in the test.

Feature: offer price
  Scenario: accept offer price
    Given buyer offers a price of "5.75"
    When seller accepts the price
    Then buyer should be able to send payment

This test immediately explains the buyer is offering a price, the seller accepts and the buyer then sends payment. In addition, when running the test it is expected that the seller will log into the site and accept the price rather than being a surprise.

Writing tests in third person also gives us the ability to include unlimited actors in the test without having to do weird tricks to switch accounts.

Feature: offer price
  Scenario: accept offer price
    Given buyer offers a price of "5.75"
    And buyer2 offers a price of "6.00"
    When seller accepts the "6.00" price
    Then buyer should not be able to send payment
    And buyer2 should be able to send payment