Deprecate And and But keywords

[mpkorstanje]

Summary

The And and But keywords are used as syntactic sugar in Gherkin. For example an And step precedented by a Given step is itself a Given step. As such there is no need for lambdas and annotations for And and But.

Allowing step definitions to be written with And and But might result in the creation of that do do not either arrange, act or assert something.

See: #1780

[aslakhellesoy]

My biggest issue with And in step definitions is that it carries an implicit and ambiguous coupling to another previous step definition. By removing it we avoid such confusion.

[mpkorstanje]

How would you avoid that coupling?

Given a user named Carl
And feature toggle X is enabled
When Carl does a thing
Then something happened

Being able to turn on a feature toggle implies the existence of some user.

It could be rewritten as:

Given feature toggle X is enabled for Carl
When Carl does a thing
Then something happened

And implicitly create a user named Carl, but that gets complicated quickly. It's easier to enable the feature toggle for whom ever is the current acting user.

[mpkorstanje]

I'm closing this. Technically it is possible to deprecate and eventually remove the keywords but I don't think it is worth the impact on existing projects nor is it worth the implementation effort. The suggested snippets already avoid the use of And and But so that should curb new usages.