Check Out the New Community Editor and Private Messages
Hi everyone! You might have noticed a number of positive changes in the SmartBear Community lately. We updated the Community to make it even better! Let me highlight a couple of things that got improved. Private messaging was made more convenient: You can see all your private message threads on the let like in any email client. The search functionality is available for Private Messages now. The Private Messages UI in Mobile View has been improved as well. Check out your private messages or send one to me đ The rich HTML editor for creating new posts/adding replies got enhanced greatly: Attachments can now be added with the help of the drag-and-drop feature. Images and videos can be drag-and-dropped to the body of the message too! More options added to the rich editorâs toolbar. Inserted code gets highlighted. Extremely helpful for our tech community. You can now Preview your message before posting. A lot of emojis to choose from when words are not enough đ I encourage all of you to start a topic or reply to the ones you like to test the new editor. Take a look at the example of a topic in the Preview mode: Looks so neat. Our team hopes that you find the improvements both helpful and awesome!Cucumber Community Newsletter: congramming, event mapping, and your worst Gherkin
Hey! We're bringing you advice, interviews, links, and tech challenges about Cucumber, open source, and BDD. For our launch, we offer you: Meet a Cucumber user: Test automation engineer Benjamin Bischoff talks about plugins, hackathons, and congramming Fun and useful links: Are you planning to scale BDD across your organization? Do you want to learn about event mapping? Will a Japanese robot wolf keep you safe from bears? Tech challenge: Show us your worst Gherkin and win a prize! Meet a Cucumber user: Benjamin Bischoff Benjamin spent 15 years as a game/application developer and trainer before shifting to test automation (a journey you can read about on his blog). Heâs currently a test automation engineer at trivago. 1. How does Cucumber improve your life? One of my first tasks in my current role was to research technologies to simplify writing tests. We desperately needed a more modern and flexible approach. Cucumber was a stand-out project which ticked all the boxes: open source, easy to use and understand, and made the tests much easier to comprehend. This helped me dive in and grasp the inner workings of it. 2. Then you developed two plugins - Cucable and Cluecumber. Do you have any suggestions for people who want to do similar things? For those projects, the starting points were concrete problems. In Cucable's case we needed faster test feedback through test parallelization. However, the existing solutions for Cucumber were either outdated or not flexible enough for our use case. I started the Cluecumber project because we needed clearer and more condensed data about which test scenarios failed and why. This led to the custom reporting solution that could be designed in a more user friendly way. If your company gives you time and resources to try new things, such as hackathons or learning times, you can experiment without having to be instantly successful. Side projects can be super beneficial, even if solutions to your problems already exist. It is said that you should not reinvent wheels - but if you want to know how wheels work, nothing beats creating your own. 3. You wrote on Twitter (@bischoffdevđ "Programming is good practices. Bad practices should be called congramming." (Underrated tweet.) What's a congramming practice that makes you cringe, and what advice would you give programmers so they'll stop doing it? I strongly believe in best practices such as extensive testing, single responsibility, readability, and late optimization. Also, Iâm a strong believer of YAGNI ("You aren't gonna need it", which comes from the extreme programming methodology), meaning you shouldnât implement features that arenât immediately necessary. It helps to step back once in a while and ask whether youâll still be able to understand your code in a few months and - more importantly - if you can extend and refactor it without fear of breaking it. Thanks, Benjamin! If you have interview suggestions (including yourself), tell us at hello@cucumber.io. Fun and useful links This recent Cucumber blogpost will help you scale BDD across your organization. BDD Advocate Jon Acker tells you all about BDD with Event Mapping. And this robot wolf from Japan will keep us all safe from bears. Join the Cucumber Open Source community here Tech challenge: your worst Gherkin Everyone makes Gherkin mistakes. Maybe instead of making it easy for non-technical people to read, you wrote it like a programming language. Maybe you bogged it down with CSS selectors, or littered it with technical points. Help other people learn from your mistakes. Here's a handy blogpost if you need reminders about Cucumber anti-patterns. Send us an example of your worst Gherkin, and tell us the story of what you learned from it. The best/worst/most entertaining example will win a fantastic prize! Everyone who sends us ugly Gherkin will get a Cucumber sticker. Entries will be read by members of the Cucumber team. By submitting, youâre giving us permission to use your name and entry for a future newsletter, blogpost, Tiktok interpretive dance, etc. Thanks for reading! Remember to post your worst Gherkin or talk with us using Comments.
New Community Feature - Reply by Email
Hi SmartBear Community! Our Team is constantly working to bringing you the best community experience, here's a great improvement we implemented recently - you can reply to the community posts straight from the email notification. For example, if you post a question and someone replies in the thread you've created, by default, you will receive an email from the Community notifying you of the answer you received. This email will contain the following options: If you click the 'Reply' link and type a message, it will be posted to the Community as soon as you hit 'Send'. You can give Kudos/accept replies as Solutions right from the email as well. Note: It's important to click the link shown in the screenshot above, in the body of the email. Just clicking the 'Reply' or 'Reply All' button in your email app won't post anything to the Community. I hope you will find this feature useful! Stay tuned for more great enhancements. Let us know if you like this feature in the comments below.Cucumber Community Newsletter #2: BDD in 30 seconds: a graphic Q&A, Meet a Cucumber user
Hi! We're happy to bring you interviews, articles, and tech challenges related to Cucumber, open source, and BDD (with a few intriguing links picked up on our forays âround the web). In this issue, we offer: State of the Cucumber BDD in 30 seconds: a graphic Q&A Meet a Cucumber User: Developer advocate Helen Scott talks about the joys of the open source community and her contribution to a public repo somewhere in the Arctic. Fun and useful links: 16 tech blogs written by women, 13 suggestions to reduce fatigue, and 1 Russian winter indie sandbox game State of the Cucumber SmartBear is committed to investing in Cucumber Open Source, and weâre thrilled to announce that a full-time developer joined the team earlier this week. Please pop over to the Cucumber community Slack and say hello to AurĂ©lien Reeves (@AurĂ©lien Reeves) - and while youâre there, why not check out some of our help and committers' channels? Weâve released two new chapters of Cucumber School - chapter 3 in JavaScript, and chapters 3 and 4 in SpecFlow. You can catch up - or sign up - at https://school.cucumber.io/ And Cucumber.js 7.7.0 is out! Aslak wants to tell you all about it! BDD in 30 seconds Meet a Cucumber user: Helen Scott Helen Scott is a Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. She has over 20 yearsâ experience in the software industry and has been a developer, technical writer, and product owner. How does Cucumber improve your life? My interaction with Cucumber began with Hacktoberfest, thanks to the wonderful help and support of Marit van Dijk. She pointed me at the issues and helped me understand the process. I updated some documentation and fixed a couple of (front-end!) bugs. The people and community are how Cucumber improves my life. What do you enjoy most about the open source community? I've learned a lot about the process of forking, branching, and rebasing the fork, but more importantly I've met some amazing people who are passionate not only about the work they do, but giving new contributors a great experience. I've learned how willing people are to explain and help you on that journey, and seen a glimpse of the value the open source community brings to software. You don't necessarily need to use the project you're committing to - you just need to use your skills. What do you like most about your role at JetBrains? Do you have any advice for people who might be thinking about changing career paths? As a Technical Writer, I thrived on creation and communication. An internal role change to Product Owner made me realise I also loved strategic aspects, but I missed content creation and working with the whole development department. A few months into the pandemic, I decided it was time to try something new, and ended up at JetBrains as a Developer Advocate, a role I absolutely love. I learn the products and create helpful content. I love listening to how our products are used and learning more about the developer experience as a whole. I also give presentations (from my house) to the community and in turn, learn more about them and what they need. This helps me understand how best I can serve the community with the products I advocate for. If you're looking to change into a career such as developer advocacy, my advice would be to create content and see if you enjoy it. Also, engaging with the community you want to work with is important. Ultimately, believe in yourself, apply for that job even if you don't have every single thing on the job spec, and look for the things that make you happy. It's easy to forget how high the barriers to entry can be for people who are new to programming. Something that appears trivial to someone whoâs been doing it a long time may cause a new programmer to stumble and give up altogether. I want to help developers have a better experience, not least because I understand how frustrating it is. On GitHub, you show âArctic Code Vault Contributorâ as a highlight. How can someone earn this cool-sounding accolade? Apparently it's because I contributed to a public repo thatâs stashed somewhere super cold in the Arctic. This JSR has not (yet) made it into the Java specification, but my contribution is why I have the badge! Whilst badges are fun, they don't tell the whole story (case in point)! I would focus on doing what you enjoy. I'm just as happy with my little green commit squares on GitHub. Thanks, Helen! Fun and useful links 16 blogs: Edidiong Asikpoâs compilation of great tech blogs written by women (and why you should read them) 13 tips: The CIO of Net Health Remote offers advice on how to sidestep work exhaustion: 13 tips to reduce fatigue 1 long winter: Looking for an indie sandbox game in which youâre cooped up in a post-Soviet era apartment? No plot, no goals, but if you turn on the radio thereâs original music? Itâs Winter.Meet the new Bitbar documentation
Greetings! I'm happy to announce that we've just updated the Bitbar documentation. We've added more great articles, a new structure, a new design for better visibility and much more. I think you can learn a lot of new Bitbar features from the docs. New documentation is available here: https://support.smartbear.com/bitbar/docs/index.html Please let us know if you have any questions/suggestions/notes about the new docs.February 2021 | ReadyAPI Community News
Hello ReadyAPI Community, Welcome to our first ReadyAPI Community News! In this newsletter, weâll cover the community news youâll find most interesting, highlight active contributors in our community, fill you in on the latest updates, and much more. Get in on the ground floor and subscribe now to the CommunityNews tag to stay in the know. And if you have any comments/suggestions about the news, let us know here or contact me personally. Now on to the February ReadyAPI Community News: Video Interview Last month we announced Community Leaders and Heroes, and itâs time to learn more about them. Please meet PrathapR ! Thanks to his enormous activity last quarter, Prathap was rewarded with the prestigious status of Community Leader! We conducted a short video interview with him that covered where heâs from, how he uses ReadyAPI to resolve tricky API testing challenges, why he moved from SoapUI to ReadyAPI â even how much he accomplished in a day when joined the SmartBear Community! >> Watch the interview with a Community Leader - PrathapR ReadyAPI Top Contributors Many of you were extremely active last quarter. You asked questions, replied to topics, gave kudos, posted solutions â all of which help the Community become better and better. Please join me in congratulating the following community members for their contributions: richie, ChrisAdams, HimanshuTayal, aaronpliu, SiKing, rajs2020, bklabel1, AsadGilani PRODUCT UPDATES Last month, we released a minor update, ReadyAPI v. 3.5.2, with changes that include: More stability for macOS Some bug fixes Read the What's New in ReadyAPI 3.5.2 to learn about these and other improvements. Download it now: If youâre a licensed user, get the latest version at the ReadyAPI Downloads Center. (And if youâre interested in giving ReadyAPI a shot, request a free 14-day trial). MOST DISCUSSED TOPICS Last month was very active with conversations. Here are some of the more interesting discussions of the past month that helped community members solve their issues: Stop Data Source Loop Adding a default argument to requests Excel data sources - using a relative path name for files Request should pick the data from a file and response should be generated in another file javax.net.ssl.SSLException: Connection reset error We still have a few questions awaiting solutions â feel free to post your thoughts: ReadyAPI Functional Testing Automate Problem ReadyAPI - How to export test results in different formats? I am not able to get output of remote shell script from groovy script in soapui Wintertainment Video Feedback Last December, many of you joined in on our annual community event â Wintertainment. The theme was "New Year Testing Resolutions". Hopefully, youâve tried using some of the new approaches we covered. Share with us any solutions youâve already implemented! In the meantime, we received your event feedback and prepared a short video, featuring you! It sounds like you enjoyed participating in the event and learned a lot, which pleases us to no end. Thanks for all your warm words. >> Watch the Wintertainment video feedback Thatâs all weâve got for today! Please share your thoughts and suggestions, ask questions, or just say "hi" to fellow ReadyAPI Community members by using the comments below. Thank you, letâs have a great February! /SmartBear Community Team
TestComplete turned 20 today! Letâs celebrate!
Hello all, Twenty years ago, TestComplete was created to help software professionals ensure the quality of any application. And, thanks to your continued business, and this communityâs innovative ideas, TestComplete continues to be one of the worldâs most popular testing solutions, year after year. At SmartBear, we share your passion for the continuous delivery of high-quality software, and we thank you for helping TestComplete reach this milestone. Want to learn more about how TestComplete came to be and its growth over the years? Check out our latest episode of The SmartBear Founders Series? https://smartbear.wistia.com/medias/ut469hik9m
