What is BDD and why should I care? (Video)

This is the pitch that I give right at the beginning of my BDD Kickstart classes to give everyone an overview of what BDD is, and why I think it matters. In this video, I cover: How BDD improves communication between developers and stakeholders Why examples are so important in BDD How BDD builds upon …

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 …

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 …

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 …