I''m fairly new to cucumber and rspec but so far am falling in love with both. I''ve read up on several different articles concerning these testing tools including the ''beta'' BDD rspec/cucumber book. I saw this thread here: http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/183428 Which concerns how small or detailed specs and scenarios should be - and the basic gist was to keep scenarios at a higher level and leave the detailed form fields etc to rspec specs. This was all wonderfully insightful but it brings me to another question. How detailed (or should they be included in cucumber tests at all?) should the error path be? "Happy paths" are great to test, but it''s also necessary to test error paths so that users aren''t encountering rails stack traces, empty feedback, etc. Should there be one scenario per "empty" field? Should there be one scenario per validation check per field? Should it be condensed to a single scenario that attempts to encompass all error paths? I have one specific, seemingly overly complicated scenario that attempts to go the one scenario per validation check per field route: Scenario Outline: Add account with invalid fields Given I am logged in as BudgetTest And I am on the New Account page When I fill in the form for account "<account_name>" with valid data And I submit the data "<value1>" for the "<field_type1>" field, "<field_name1>" And I submit the data "<value2>" for the "<field_type2>" field, "<field_name2>" And I press "Add Account" Then I should see the rendered template for "the new account page" And I should see an error indicating "<field_name>" was "<error>" I''ve removed the Scenarios: blocks because they would wordwrap and look terrible/undreadable. Following this is two sets of scenarios: Scenarios: missing required fields Scenarios: submitting bad data Some of the fields compare data with each other to determine validity which is why there''s two data entries in the scenario outline. If the second is left blank then the defaults that were set in "When I fill in the form..." are used for it. Each "Scenarios" block contains a table with allll of the fields defined by <> in the outline. As you can see, it seems to me to be overly complicated, overly verbose, and perhaps doing more than it should be. I think maybe this test goes overboard...but what level of detail is good for error-path testing? -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.