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 […]

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, […]

TDD vs BDD

I regularly find myself explaining to people the difference between TDD (Test-Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development). There still seems to be a lot of confusion over this, so I wanted to write this up for reference. Late last year I was interviewed for a virtual panel on InfoQ along with Dan, Gojko, and Liz. […]

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 […]