Cucumber documentation (covers Sinatra and other non-Rails frameworks)

Martin Englund posted an open question to the Puppet mailing list a few days ago asking how people are verifying their systems are built as expected:

When you write code, you always use unit testing & integration testing to verify that the application is working as expected, but why don't we use that when we install a system?

What are you using to verify that your system is correctly configured and behaves the way you want?

He linked to a blog post demonstrating how he was verifying his machines using Cucumber.

Coincidentally, about a week earlier at Devopsdays in Gent, I was talking to Felix Kronlage and Bernd Ahlers from bytemine about doing similar things through testing SSH and mail delivery with cucumber-nagios.

It's pretty cool people are thinking about doing BDD/TDD with infrastructure, and it's even cooler that the tools are at the point where doing this is actually possible.

When doing software testing, your testing tool is normally separate from the language and libraries you're building the software with (but almost always written in the same language). When testing your infrastructure, I think it makes perfect sense to apply this practice.