Every organisation that makes software, makes mistakes. Sometimes, despite everybody’s best efforts, you end up releasing a bug into production. Customers are confused and angry; stakeholders are panicking. Despite the pressure, you knuckle down and fix the bug. Now it gets interesting: you have to deploy your fix to production. Depending on how your organisation […]
Author Archives: Matt
Cucumber 1.3.1 released
Over the weekend we released Cucumber version 1.3.0. This was quickly replaced by 1.3.1 when we realised there was a bug 1.3.0 that only appeared on Windows. Along with masses of bugfixes, this release contains the early stages of some serious internal refactoring work planned for release in version 2.0. Although our tests continue to […]
A coding dojo story
It was 2008, and I was at the CITCON conference in Amsterdam. I’d only started going to conferences that year, and was feeling as intimidated as I was inspired by the depth of experience in the people I was meeting. It seemed like everyone at CITCON had written a book, their own mocking framework, or […]
Please consider supporting my work on Cucumber through gittip
My first commit to Cucumber was in 2008. Since then I’ve poured countless hours into the project and the community around it, whether directly as commits to the code, or answering questions on this mailing list, or writing blog articles. I am independent, so those hours have all been done on my own time. Why […]
Optimising a slow build? You’re solving the wrong problem
At the time I left Songkick, it took 1.5 hours to run all the cukes and rspec ‘unit’ tests on the big ball of Rails. We were already parallelising over a few in-house VMs at the time to make this manageable, but it still took 20 minutes or so to get feedback. After I left, […]
Cucumber 1.2.2 Released
This is a maintenance release, but marks a new period in Cucumber’s life as it was released by our new team member Oleg Sukhodolsky. Oleg has been doing a fantastic job since he joined the team a few weeks ago, closing tickets like a boss. Here’s a summary of what’s in the release: New Features […]
Building software backwards
I am utterly dismayed by the number of so-called Agile teams I meet who are still, after all this time, building software backwards. What do I mean by that? Let’s defer to the great W. Edwards Deming as he ridiculed the approach of 1970s American manufacturing to quality: Let’s make toast the American way! I’ll […]
The problem with solutions
First date. You’re out for dinner and the meal has gone well. Good food, great conversation. The waiter brings the bill, and you ask to pay with your credit card: May I submit my billing info to your merchant account via your payment gateway? Your date looks at you askance: nobody talks like that. Do […]
TDD vs BDD
I regularly find myself explaining to people the difference between TDD (Test-Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development). There still seems to be a lot of confusion over this, so I wanted to write this up for reference. Late last year I was interviewed for a virtual panel on InfoQ along with Dan, Gojko, and Liz. […]
Is Cucumber just a scam?
David Heinemeier Hansson recently wrote on his blog: Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-programmers-writing-tests (and send me a bottle of fairy dust if you’re there!) Well, good news readers! The magic kingdom is real! I’ve been there! Look, I even have a bottle of fairy dust. I keep it […]