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 do I do that?
It's a complicated question. My consulting business is built around BDD, so I have a vested interest in the success of the Cucumber project. It's …
- OnRails.org: Cucumber, meet Routes
- Ruby Inside: DHH Offended By RSpec, Says Test::Unit Is Just Great
- Dead Programmer Society: The FutureRuby Revolution Will Not Be On AOL - Part 2
- The "Tech. Arch.": Green Behavior-Driven Development With Cucumber
- Opscode Blog: On the level: Testing your infrastructure
- Joseph Wilk: The Art of Cucumber London Workshop
When I talk to people about adopting BDD, the most frequent objection I hear is that it must take longer. This is true, in a sense, because it does take longer for a change to get to the stage where a developer is done with it. If you're used to burning toast you'll find this frustrating, because you don't realise yet that the time and effort you're putting in to write the tests up-front won't pay off until later, when you hand the change to your testers and they can't …
- Redline Software Inc. - Winnipeg's Leader in Ruby on Rails Development: Intro to BDD presentation
- Practicing Ruby: Issue #19: Thoughts on Mocking (1 of 2)
- Jake Scruggs: Ruby Kaigi 2010 Day 1
- The Life Of A Radar: Rails 3 Book: Staying Focussed
- Jason Seifer: Live blogging BizConf Day 2
- Mike Perham: MiniTest - Ruby 1.9′s test framework
This is the single most powerful behavioural shift I have seen in teams adopting BDD. Simply by getting the business users, the analysts, the testers and the developers to adopt this vocabulary of "given/when/then", they discover that a world of ambiguity falls away.
§ Old people icons: floppy disks, carbon copy, radio buttons and other icons that no longer make any sense .
§ Top 10 Weird APIs , serving your Chunk Norris facts, making fake calls, and …
I made a presentation on Refactoring & BDD at Seattle.rb back on 10/09/2012. I put my slides and notes from the presentation up on Speaker Deck.
Seattle.rb - Refactoring & BDD Presentation
Some quick takeaways ...
Problem Domain
The less your problem is understood, the more complicated your solution is likely to be. This is one of the reasons why we refactor code - we increase our understanding of the problem domain and increase our abilities to apply solutions to the domain as time goes by.
- CaelumObject Developers' Blog: Simple changes might not lead to simple solutions
- Plataformatec Blog: About the composed_of removal
- till's blog: jQuery post requests with a json response, sans eval()
- RailsCasts: Episode 11: Refactoring User Name Part 2
- Rowan Hick: Refactoring by Martin Fowler - Developer must have
- Christy John: Patterns for Database Interaction : Data Mapper - an example driven explanation using PHP
…design aspects of TDD. RSpec and some of the early definitions/discussions of BDD ("it's all behavior!") fit perfectly into my thinking and my world.
After I left Object Mentor, RSpec was part of my day to day work on Ruby applications, but most of my work on its maintenance moved to my spare time. This was fine at first, as I had the support of employers and family, but I found myself doing less and less of pretty much everything else that I enjoy and learn from.
- Ruby Inside: The Last Week in Ruby: A Great Ruby Shirt, RSpec Team Changes and a Sneaky Segfault Trick
- Ruby Inside: This Week in Ruby: Nominate Your Ruby Heroes, Include/Extend, Ruby on Netbeans, Jekyll-Bootstrap, and more
- the evolving ultrasaurus: on choosing RSpec as a test framework
- matt-darby.com posts: How to properly commit to a git repository
- Practicing Ruby: Issue #18: Dirty Little Secrets about Testing
- Engine Yard Developer Blog: Ruby Summer of Code is Here!
BDD DSL
MiniTest also includes a basic BDD DSL like RSpec:
require 'minitest/spec' describe Meme do before do @ meme = Meme. new end describe "when asked about cheeseburgers" do it "should respond positively" do @ meme . i_can_has_cheezburger ?. must_equal "OHAI!" end end describe "when asked about blending possibilities" do it "won't say no" do @ meme . does_it_blend ?. wont_match / ^no / i end end end
- giant robots smashing into other giant robots: This week in open source
- Ruby Inside: This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk
- Alex R. Young : Fear and Loathing in JavaScript DSLs
- A Rubyist Railstastic Adventure: Ruby Test::Unit sucks! (and why I still use it)
- ZURB: Why Making A Feature Too Simple Can Turn Complex
- interblah.net: tdd-and-the-implementations-it-might-drive
I'm excited to be presenting on Behavior-Driven Objects at the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange in NYC on Monday, October 1st (details below). From the conference website : One of the original ideas behind BDD was that testing should be about behavior at all levels. Effectively, all automated tests can be viewed as "functional tests" of entry points, be they user facing or internal, crossing procedural boundaries or not. In this talk we'll explore approaches …
- Opscode Blog: On the level: Testing your infrastructure
- Redline Software Inc. - Winnipeg's Leader in Ruby on Rails Development: ASP.Net MVC vs Ruby on Rails Smackdown Results
- Meta Bates: How to Become a Test Driven Developer
- Trevor Turk: Links for 3-15-11
- Merbist: The Ruby revolution is over
- Engine Yard Developer Blog: Getting Started with Node.js
§ Mighty useful: Bash redirection cheat sheet . Useful, but on rare occasions: set operations using the Unix shell .
§ BDD meets Git — Pre-emptive commit comments :
Rule #1: write commit comments before coding
Rule #2: write what the software should be supposed to do, not what you did
§ Don't get caught by the link-bait. Hate-reads and how for-profit sites work .
§ Hall of Shame of Skeuomorphism . May you never have to work on an app that's featured there.
- A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #955
…runners available but Mocha is the most versatile and easiest to learn. It provides both BDD and TDD interface styles and can easily be integrated with continuous integration tools; it can also be used to test browser features. Mocha, however, does not come with an assertion library: for that you should check out one of my own modules - Chai. It provides several different assertion styles, an expansive set of core assertions, and can be extended with plugins. Chai also works for both …
- Engine Yard Developer Blog: Quickstart: How to run Node.js on Engine Yard Cloud
- Axon Flux // A Ruby on Rails Blog: Node.js beginner links
- Heroku: The New Heroku (Part 2 of 4): Node.js & New HTTP Capabilities
- Luigi Montanez: Leveling Up for JSConf and NodeConf
- Bamboo Blog: Living on the edge of the WebSocket protocol
- Comments on: blog: Link dump for August 29th
Cucumber Recipes: Automate Anything with BDD Tools and Techniques now in beta
- MySQL Performance Blog: Percona sessions at the MySQL conference
- Ruby Inside: A Review of "The RSpec Book" by David Chelimsky
- Ruby on Rails Tutorial News: Ruby on Rails Tutorial, second edition (updated for Rails 3.2)
- Redline Software Inc. - Winnipeg's Leader in Ruby on Rails Development: ASP.Net MVC vs Ruby on Rails Smackdown Results
- Obie Fernandez: The Next Big Leap
- RubyLearning Blog: Charles Feduke Winner RPCFN #2