Now go to http://watirmelon.com/2011/05/18/specification-by-example-a-love-story/ and enjoy!

Hellesøy said that Cucumber had over 120000 downloads and he estimates that there are 20000 people using it now. Since it was first released, more than 300 people contributed to this open source project. Apart from the main project, there are more than 300 affiliated projects related to Cucumber on GitHub. Based on this, Hellesøy claims that Cucumber is today the most popular tool for automated acceptance testing.

In terms of future developments, he identified four important areas that he will be focusing on:

• Improving documentation: Hellesøy and Matt Wynne are working on a Cucumber book.
• A native Java implementation: Cuke4Duke allows teams to run Cucumber on JVM through JRuby but this is slow and tricky to set up. A native Java implementation will be better integrated into the Java development ecosystem, for example it will run from JUnit, and it will be faster according to Hellesøy.
• Improving internal design: while working on the native Java version, Hellesøy identified several areas that could be improved internally even in the Ruby version. He mentioned that the formatter API will change soon and that configuration will be much more flexible in the future – allowing teams to configure Cucumber from Ruby, not just text files. Another improvement will be the possibility to embed Cucumber and run it as a library, not just as a command line tool
• A WYSIWYG editor – under the working name ACE – should allow business users to access and edit Cucumber feature files easier. Hellesøy announced that ACE will be web based and provide syntax validation, highlighting, auto-completion and integration with version control systems. An early preview version of the editor is now live on http://cukes.info/trycuke/ – with syntax highlighting functionality.

The main author of this e-book is my colleague David de Florinier, and I’ve also contributed a bit.

The first version covers the basics of Cucumber, setting up for Ruby, Java and .NET projects, implementing basic features in all three languages, effective test design and managing complex features efficiently. We plan to develop this guide incrementally, and the next version will include web browser automation topics.

To download the PDF or read the e-Book online, point your browser to cuke4ninja.com. For news and updates, follow cuke4ninja.

Here’s the video from my talk on Behaviour Driven Development and Acceptance Testing with Cucumber last week. In this talk, I go over the basics of Cucumber scenario structure and integration and show examples of using it with Ruby, .NET and Java applications. (scroll down to see the slides and links from the presentation) If you’re interested Cucumber or Behaviour-Driven development, also check out my new Introduction to BDD and Hands-on BDD with Cucumber workshops.

Finally, here are the links I mentioned during the talk.

• Main Cucumber web site
• Richard Lawrence’s blog (.NET Cuke4Nuke integration)
• Cuke4Duke (Java integration)
• Visual Studio plugin for Cuke4Nuke
• My BDD in .NET with Cucumber article series: part 1, part 2, part 3
• Introduction to BDD and BDD with Cucumber workshops

I’ll be presenting Cucumber a tool for behaviour-driven development and agile acceptance testing. I will demonstrate how to use Cucumber for Java, .NET and Ruby applications, talk about new Cucumber features and best practices for writing and maintaining Cucumber scenarios.

The event is free, but up-front registration is required for capacity planning. For more information and to register click here