Cucumber + Capybara = Web Testing Delight

Following on from Chris’ screencast showing the simplest Cucumber project ever, I recorded a screencast showing the simplest Cucumber web testing project ever. In just five minutes, I’ll show you how to use Capybara to drive a simple Google web search from a Cucumber scenario. If you’re looking to get started using Cucumber to test …

Thinking outside the shu box

I just got back from the fantastic Lean Agile Scotland conference, where I spoke about why agile fails. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling this year since The Cucumber Book came out, consulting and training different companies in BDD. A pattern I keep seeing are companies who adopted agile a few years ago but …

Speaking at Lean Agile Scotland 2012

The Lean Agile Scotland conference is shaping up to be a really great event. I’ll be speaking about why agile fails, drawing on my experience coaching numerous software teams and organisations. I’ll highlighting the reasons why so many companies fail to reap the benefits enjoyed by the early adopters of agile and give you some …

Triangulating from GOOS – Great books on Object Oriented Design

A few weeks ago I asked on GOOS the mailing list about some other books that teach the same style of design. I’ve just put together a big order for the juiciest looking ones. Here they are: Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs by Jeff Magee Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock …

Public BDD Training (London, October)

So far all of my BDD training has been done in-house as private courses for companies. That’s about to change. On October 8th – 11th Chris Parsons and I will be running four one-day training workshops in London focussed on BDD and specification by example. These are the same courses we’ve been successfully running in-house …

Matt vs NYC

New York is one of my favourite cities in the world. I’m extremely fortunate to be able to spend a whole week there next week. I’ll be mostly hanging out at QCon: I’ll be speaking at QCon on Monday afternoon about the use and abuse of other people’s Cucumbers. I’m running a hands-on BDD workshop …

Hexagonal Rails: Objects, Values and Hexagons

This is the second post in a series about my experience of applying a GOOS-style hexagonal architecture to a Ruby on Rails application. In the first post, I talked about why the idiomatic, connected, style of Rails architecture might have advantages in the short term, but that I want a more modular architecture to make …

A vision for Cucumber 2.0

At last month’s CukeUp conference, I held a panel discussion between Aslak Hellesoy, Julien Biezemans, Oriol Gual and Jonas Nicklas. I chose these panelists because each of them has written a variation on the original Ruby Cucumber, and I wanted to try to pull these ideas together into a vision for Cucumber 2.0. This post …

Bootstrapd – a conference for self-funded startups

I’ve been trying to bootstrap a product for the last year or so; I’ve also got several friends who are either already doing it, or have recognised that it’s a better way to make a living than consulting / contracting for a daily rate. I want to get everyone together so we can swap ideas …