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 …

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 …

Interviewed by RubySource

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …