A fruitful evening

Thursday evening was another in the series of free Agile Testing events at SkillsMatter and a chance to listen to Gojko Adzic talk about BDD with Cucumber

My first visit to the new venue for SkillsMatter and it was pleasing to see the event packed out with people having to sit at the side and stand at the back.

The talk itself was interesting, especially as I knew very little about Cucumber and BDD. The list of tools that Cucumber integrates with was large ( WebRat, Steam, Watir, Selenium etc etc - some tools I had heard of, others were new to me and a reminder that this is a fast moving field which means it is easy to get left behind - another good reason to go to events like this )

Someone had their Twitter account open and was posting to it as well as keeping notes - wish they had a quieter keyboard and I hate to think what it would be like if everyone in the audience had their laptops open during presentations !

A slight glitch in Gojko's talk when the example he had up on his slide couldn't be read by the audience but a dimming of the lights helped. The examples were the usual noddy 'Hello World' ones but gave enough flavour for me to want to dust off my Ruby book and try some of this out for myself

Talk was fairly short which meant there was plenty of time for networking at the pub afterwards. Nice to meet up with Nathan Bain, organiser of the Agile Testing (London ) meetup group and also meet up again with Antony Marcano and his pairing partner Andy Palmer and hear about their new venture, RiverGlide

Next session is already set up - ATDD - Bring Developers And Testers Together Feb 11th. Sessions are free, the pub afterwards is close by so no reason for testers in London not to be keeping up with developments in agile testing.

Final word goes to Gojko with this warning about using Cucumber

"It's a tool, so like a sharp knife, if you cut yourself then it's your own fault"

Yup, those cucumbers can be dangerous - so use with care.






( according to Wikipedia cucumbers are fruits although perceived, prepared and eaten as vegetables. So there )