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). He’s 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 However, the existing solutions for Cucumber were either outdated or not flexible enough for our use case.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 (@bischoffdev😞 "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, I’m a strong believer of YAGNI ("You aren't gonna need it", which comes from the extreme programming methodology), meaning you shouldn’t implement features that aren’t immediately necessary. It helps to step back once in a while and ask whether you’ll 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 communityhere 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, you’re 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.Cucumber Community Newsletter #2: BDD in 30 seconds: a graphic Q&A, Meet a Cucumber user
Hi! We're happy tobring you interviews, articles, and tech challenges related to Cucumber, open source, and BDD (with a few intriguing links picked up on our forays ‘round the web). In this issue, we offer: State of the Cucumber BDD in 30 seconds: agraphic Q&A Meet a Cucumber User: Developer advocate Helen Scott talks about the joys of the open source community andher contribution to a public repo somewhere in the Arctic. Fun and useful links: 16 tech blogswritten 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 we’re thrilled to announce that a full-time developer joined the team earlier this week. Please pop over to theCucumber community Slackand say hello to Aurélien Reeves (@Aurélien Reeves) - and while you’re there, why not check out some of our help and committers' channels? We’ve 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 - athttps://school.cucumber.io/ And Cucumber.js 7.7.0 is out! Aslakwants to tell you all about it! BDD in 30 seconds Meet a Cucumber user:Helen Scott Helen Scottis a Java Developer Advocate at JetBrains. She has over 20 years’ 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 ofMarit 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 who’s 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. OnGitHub, you show “Arctic Code Vault Contributor” as a highlight. How can someone earn this cool-sounding accolade? Apparently it's because I contributed toa public repothat’s stashed somewhere super cold in the Arctic.This JSRhas 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 Asikpo’s compilation ofgreat 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 you’re cooped up in a post-Soviet era apartment? No plot, no goals, but if you turn on the radio there’s original music?It’s Winter.
Cucumber After hooks execution order
Hello, I'm working on a project in which we're utilising Ruby/Watir with Cucumber and we have a hooks file in which we've defined numerous After hooks in our framework. Now the problem is that there is no execution order set for the after hooks, so the privilege an After hook is taking before all the after hooks is making Bearer token and another after hook code is unable to perform the task it is supposed to do, is there any way to setup the execution order for after hooks like after(option=1) and after(option=0), I saw this options in Java but it does not support in Ruby, thank you.
