Comparison with Cucumber

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The most principal difference is that the Cucumber core functionality is translating sentences of natural language in calls of program code whereas SysNat provides additional means that are essential to run UI tests (e.g. data import, the communication with the application under test or a valuable test report, see SysNat Layers). All functionality provided by Cucumber should be available in SysNat, too. If not, give us a note...

Differences for the users applying SysNat

Cucumber	SysNat
Based on features which contain scenarios	Based on Executable Examples (correspond to scenarios) combined to behaviours (correspond to features)
Input are feature files which contain a feature with its scenarios	Input are natural language executable examples files (nlxx) which contain a behaviour with its Executable Examples
Use of Gerkhin (BDD-Keyword-colletion) is a must	Use of BDD-Keywords is optional
Optimized for Declarative Formulation Style	Optimized for using Declarative and Imperative style or the combination of both
No support for natural language scripts	Reuse of a list of natural language instruction by Natural Language Scripts
No support for import of test data from external sources	Supports import from text and excel files
No support to archive test results	An archive layer is integrated
Test reports simply repeats natural language instructions	Generation of a Domain User Valuable Test Report
No support for Dynamic Test Objects	Dynamic Test Objects supported
Only 'Background' supported as Feature Level Step	Supports four kinds of Behaviour Level Instructions

Differences from the developer's point of view

Cucumber	SysNat
Setup by installing plugins in your IDE	Setup by copying a prepared IDE that contains a Maven based workspace
No integrated communication layer (to be implemented in total by developers)	Communication layer for handling web applicatons via Selenium integrated (can be modified by developers if needed)
Developers implement step definition Java files to make natural language executable	Developers implement Java files called LanguageTemplateContainer to make natural language executable
Implementation of step definitions allows only one annotation per method	Implementation of language templates allows more than one annotations per method (make definition of synonyms and multilanguage support easy)
Execution by calling step definition methods via reflection	Execution by running JUnit test classes which are autogenerated and then executed in a separate runtime

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