Saturday, December 6, 2014

Cucumber Ain't Bad, But You Might Be Doing It Wrong

My talk got selected for CodeMash 2015, and I was invited to speak there in January 2015. The best way to prepare for the talk is by practicing it a couple of times before the conference. I've worked hard on my message, on my slides, I even watched Ben Orenstein's presentation on "How to Talk to Developers".

This past Tuesday I gave the talk's initial version at the Chicago Ruby User Group. A good crowd came out to listen to what I had to say about the topic despite the cold, wintery weather. I received a couple of questions, had good conversations with some of the folks afterwards.

Are you unsure about the topic? Here is the pitch for my talk:

The cry from developers is unanimous: “I don’t like Cucumber. My acceptance tests are brittle and hard to maintain!” And in fact, they can be.

This presentation will show you what tools and techniques you should use to write independent, stateless step definitions that can be weaved together to form a testing DSL.

You can review the code examples in this repo.

And here are the slides: