Does cucumber do away with the need to write unit tests?

Question

I am a little confused by the sheer number of testing frameworks available for Ruby/ROR.

I have recently watched the Cucumber Railscasts and found them very interesting.

Answer 1

When you create a rails app you get functional, interation, and unit tests by default. Cucumber is an additional test it is a way to also test the experience that your user will have. When they click the button labeled "go" they should see "success" rendered rather than a 404. This will make sure that nothing you do accidentally messes up the user experience, and that from the top to bottom your app works for the most common use cases you can think of. The other tests are meant to insure that nothing goes wrong, and that you have inspected ever model and method with a microscope. It may be possible to replicate unit tests in their entirety with cucumber, but it would be painful (and crazy slow to execute, especially if you're using selenium). The best time to write tests is when you're developing code, and the quickiest and easiest way to do that, is by using in the built-in rails testing and maybe some additional help such as shoulda, rspec, also i'm a huge fan of factory-girl. If you haven't already checked it out www.railscasts.com has a great intro to cucumber, and rspec, and factory-girl, ... I know this question has already been answered (it's no) but this is my two cents. Good luck coding!!