Last week I had a great chat with Pat Shaughnessy about The Cucumber Book which has been published as an interview on RubySource. Pat really managed to get to the heart of my opinions about how to use Cucumber effectively, so if you’re too busy to read the book, this will give you a good summary …
Author Archives: Matt
Hexagonal Rails – Introduction
A few months ago, development of http://relishapp.com reached what is a familiar but rather unpleasant plateau for me. Up until that point, it had been developed using conventional Ruby on Rails idioms, with controllers that talk directly to ActiveRecord class methods to make queries, then set instance variables to pass the results of those queries to …
Free BDD Coaching
In this blog post, I will reveal a secret to you. A secret that can get you access to free, hands-on BDD coaching from some of the world’s leading experts like Aslak Hellsøy, Mike Sassak, Greg Hnatiuk, Joseph Wilk and even me, Matt Wynne. Yes, that’s right: absolutely FREE. Would you like to know how? …
Using Cucumber for Load Testing
I sometimes get asked whether it’s possible to use Cucumber to test performance. The way to do it is to specify concrete examples of scenarios that the system will find itself in under stress. For example: Given there are 100,000 users registered on the system When I create a new account Then I should be …
Commands vs Queries
There are some fascinating discussions going on over on the mailing list for Avdi Grimm’s excellent e-book, Objects on Rails. Recently, in a discussion about command-query separation and Dan Kubb posted this little piece of beauty: One convention I use is that query methods are idempotent and return a value, while command methods change state, …
Our Consumer Culture and What it Means for Software Craftsmanship
We have an old Kenwood Chef A701 that’s hardly out of use in our kitchen. A few days ago, the gearbox went. I bought a reconditioned one on Ebay for £23, and this morning I made the time to do the repair. As I tinkered away with my screwdriver, I reflected on how grateful I …
Continue reading “Our Consumer Culture and What it Means for Software Craftsmanship”
Passwords are Backward
I really hate passwords. Today I read this, and realised I’m not alone: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2011/12/04/fuck-passwords/ If you feel like me, go and have a read. I’m pretty sure it will cheer you up.
Skillsmatter BDD Exchange
Last week I travelled down to London to the BDD Exchange conference. It was a one-day conference organised by Gojko Adzic and I had a great time. I missed Gojko’s talk as I travelled down from my cave in Scotland on the day, but I did arrive in time to see Chris Matt’s excellent lecture …
Relish Roadmap
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 …
Fine-Slicing Beats Estimation for Predictability
As requested by JB in the comments to my previous post, here is some data about what happens when a team choose fine-slicing over estimation. You’re about to see a CFD chart drawn by a team who used BDD to break down every requirement into scenarios before they started hacking on them. The items on …
Continue reading “Fine-Slicing Beats Estimation for Predictability”