The project for Cucumber, a Behaviour Driven Development, BDD, tool, has recently increased the team and intensive work last two months has brought open bugs down substantially, Aslak Hellesøy revealed when talking about the Cucumber ecosystem during a Cucumber conference day last week.
Referring to an email asking if Cucumber is a dead project, Aslak, creator and core developer, admits that the project during the last two years has evolved slowly, as indicated by an increasing open bug count in the Ruby version. But things have changed; a new larger team has been formed and during the last two months almost 150 bugs have been closed, bringing the open bug count down to 20 with an average of 40 days for a bug to be fixed.
Besides a new team the focus this year is on two activities; designing a new Gherkin parser to improve the internal quality of Cucumber making fixing report bugs easier, and improving the current documentation wiki which has overgrown. The plan is to migrate the wiki to a new documentation web site, and to decommission the wiki by this summer. To achieve this, the team needs help from the community, quoting Aslak: “if everybody using Cucumber helps out with one paragraph this can be done”.
Two other common issues that the community can help out with is answering questions on the Cucumber forum instead of waiting for an “authoritative” answer and redirecting questions about tools, e.g. Selenium and Maven to the correct forum. This will save time for the team letting them focus on the code.
Cucumber is an open source tool for Behaviour Driven development, BDD, currently for nine programming languages, including Ruby, JVM-based languages and JavaScript. .NET languages are supported through the SpecFlow project using the same Gherkin syntax.