Testing a Rule
Big ACL provides a built-in rule testing environment that allows you to validate authorization rules before publishing them.
This feature automatically generates Gherkin test scenarios based on the rule’s structure and your data model, enabling you to verify expected outcomes across a wide range of principal–resource combinations.
The test suite is accessible in the rule authoring screen by clicking the Test button:
1. Overview
Section titled “1. Overview”Rule testing ensures that your authorization logic behaves as intended across different contexts.
The platform uses your natural-language rule, the extracted structured representation, and your organization’s entities to:
- Generate Gherkin test scenarios (Given / When / Then format)
- Simulate access decisions using the Big ACL policy engine
- Highlight discrepancies between expected and actual results
- Provide debugging information if conditions fail
This enables rapid validation without manually crafting complex test cases.
2. Automatic Generation of Gherkin Test Scenarios
Section titled “2. Automatic Generation of Gherkin Test Scenarios”When a rule is created or edited, Big ACL produces a set of test scenarios in Gherkin syntax, a standard used in Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).
