I want to give you some news about the future of Relish. A lot has happened since we first started the project just over a year ago. Justin quit the project to concentrate on his new role on the RSpec core team, The Cucumber Book went into beta, and my wife gave birth to our second child. All of those things have meant that Relish hasn’t been able to progress as quickly as I’d have ideally liked, so thanks for sticking with us!
I’m still passionate about the vision for Relish, and as I teach training courses on using Cucumber and BDD, it seems to resonate with a lot of people. With The Cucumber Book pretty much behind us now, Relish will come back into focus and the pace will pick up again. I hope to have it launched by the end of the first quarter of 2012.
Here’s a rough outline of what we plan to do:
Usability & Information Architecture Enhancements
I have an IA specialist on the team now, and you may have noticed the first tweaks we’ve been making this week. There’s a lot to catch up, so we’ll focus on this until the existing features are polished to his (and hopefully your) satisfaction. Please let us know how we’re doing as we progress, and let us know if any of the changes annoy or delight you.
If there’s anything specific you’d like to see done that isn’t already logged in UserVoice, please add it there or reply to this post.
Test Results
Relish can’t deliver on the promise of living documentation until the non-technical readers can tell, when they’re looking at a scenario, whether it’s passing or not. We’ll be building a plugin for Cucumber that allows developers and testers to send their test results to Relish, so each scenario can be rendered with a big green tick if it’s passing. This will also enable us to start building all kinds of exciting dashboards for project managers to get a high-level overview of what’s going on.
Commenting / Feedback
Just being able to read features is not enough. I want Relish to be a collaboration tool, and that means that stakeholders should be able to comment on and give feedback about the documentation they’re reading.
RSS / Activity Feeds
People who want to stay up to date with changes to a project will be able to get a nice high-level summary via RSS, and possibly other means too.
Enterprise Install
As the codebase stabilises, I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of a stand-alone installer for customers who are not happy about having their features stored outside of their firewall. In the new year, I’ll be looking for a couple of friendly enterprise customers to help me shape this. If you’re interested, please get in touch.
Plans & Pricing
Yes, it had to happen eventually 🙂
When we come out of private beta (which is still a few months away), it will be with paid accounts for private projects. This is a hard call to make, and I’ll be in working with our beta tester community to get an idea of what they feel is a reasonable price to pay for the service. Public accounts like RSpec and VCR will continue to be free.
As always, I’m keen to hear what you think of these plans. Let me know in the comments.