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 […]
Category Archives: Agile / Lean Software Development
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 […]
Using BDD Scenarios to Track Project Velocity
Before you write any code, start by brainstorming all the scenarios you’ll need to cover to make the story done. Do this collaboratively with everyone (devs, testers, UX, business people, product owner) who is interested in the story. Don’t try to make them valid Cucumber scenarios, just make a list of them on a whiteboard, […]
BDD Training
Update: This training is now available as a public course, starting October 8th in London. Would you like to learn how Behaviour-Driven Development can help your company get better at software development? I’ve helped several teams learn BDD, and I’ve started to formalise the training I’ve been doing into a set of course modules. The […]
Announcing The Cucumber Book (Beta)
I love using Cucumber to help me write software. I almost find it hard to imagine doing it any other way. I want more people to discover this for themselves, so for the last year or so Aslak and I have been writing a book all about using Cucumber for Behaviour-Driven Development: We hope we’ve […]
Fixing my testing workflow
Okay I’m bored of this. I need to talk about it. I love to use Ruby, RSpec, Cucumber and Rails to do test-driven development, but my tools for running tests are just infuriatingly dumb. Here’s what I want: When a test fails, it should be kept on a list until it has been seen to […]
Plan on Friday, Reflect on Monday
If you work in a regular weekly iteration rhythm, it’s quite normal to think about starting the week with a planning session, and ending the week with a retrospective. I have a new idea for you, which my team have just happened upon, but which I rather like: Swap them around. Instead of trying to […]
Targeting Multiple Platforms (JRuby etc) with a RubyGems .gemspec
Recently we had a user who runs the relish gem on JRuby, and needed jruby-openssl to be loaded. He kindly submitted this patch, which I merged in without really thinking about it too much. Then the problems started. That’s not the right way to express dependencies for different platforms using RubyGems and Bundler. I’ve done […]
Cucumber: Why Bother?
It’s perfectly possible to write automated acceptance tests without using Cucumber. You can just write them in pure Ruby. Take this test for withdrawing cash from an ATM: Scenario: Attempt withdrawal using stolen card Given I have $100 in my account But my card is invalid When I request $50 Then my card should not […]