Ninjas, gherkins, cukes - and dont forget Chuck

A few days off work, snowbound Britain meant going anywhere was impossible and also not wanting to be part of the after-Xmas Sales frenzy meant a few days to work on some of the things I've never got around to so far.

One of those things was to learn some more about ATDD/BDD and learn something about these funnily named new tools such as Cucumber.
Posts such as A day in the life of an acceptance tester are good but not the same as trying it out yourself.

A cool way to start seemed to be with the crazily named Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls - " a step-by-step guide for Cucumber, a tool that is quickly becoming the weapon of choice for many agile teams "

The guide offered options for Ruby, .Net and Java and as I was also wanting to get back into Ruby and was halfway through Design Patterns in Ruby book I chose the Ruby option.

I already had Ruby installed on my machine so a couple of gem installs and I was all set ( OK, it was more than a couple as I got the wrong versions a couple of times )

An hour later and I'd run the first set of examples and had some Ninjas that were aware that they should run as fast as possible from Chuck Norris. The guide does not take itself seriously and tries to inject some humour and the examples it uses are for training up Ninjas. Certainly makes a change from the dreaded bank account example with deposits and withdrawals. Yawn.


Some mixed emotions when doing this though.

On the one hand a few years ago I'd become stale as a programmer ( hence the move to testing ) so dealing with incompatible versions and syntax errors and missing header files was a brief nasty flashback to the bad old days.

On the other hand the reason I originally became a programmer was because I was interested in all this stuff and it was a reminder of why I liked it - DOS boxes, IDE's, typing commands and making all sorts of stuff happen with a few keystrokes.

So I've got the programming bug again and now I'm off to find some more serious uses for this stuff other than running from Chuck Norris...
( though that is a good thing to do )

I recommend the guide as a good intro to the topic and a quick way to get up and running.