Matt Wynne from the Cucumber core team announced last weekend at the Barcelona Ruby Conference the upcoming launch of Cucumber Pro, an online platform for collaboration and reporting on top of the open source Cucumber tool for writing executable features specification. According to the Cucumber Pro team:
Cucumber Pro is a collaboration platform built around Cucumber. It offers real-time collaborative editing, reports and source control integration. Cucumber Pro's relationship to Cucumber is like Github's relationship to Git - a web app built around a command line tool.
This new offering promises to attract more traditional enterprises to use Cucumber given this expansion outside of the open source world (and beyond the technical development realm), with contractual support available. The founders confirm they’ve seen the need for this commercial offering in their own consulting experience:
The main goal of Cucumber Pro is to bring product owners, domain experts and other non-technical stakeholders into the BDD process. The raw text-editor and command line based UI that Cucumber uses is just too alienating for non-technical users.
Many companies refuse to use software that isn't backed by a commercial entity. They also want to know how to obtain official support for the tool they're buying.
The Cucumber Pro team made clear to InfoQ that Cucumber Pro will not interfere or slow down the Cucumber roadmap:
Cucumber Pro is not a forked version of Cucumber with "professional" features. The open source Cucumber project will continue its life as usual.We have been working on Cucumber Pro for about 6 months, and in the meanwhile we have kept up merging pull requests, fixing bugs and making releases of Cucumber-Ruby, Cucumber-JVM and Cucumber-JS.
The Cucumber Team has grown much larger in the past year, so issues are being dealt with quite well. Cucumber Pro's success relies on a healthy state of the Cucumber open source project, so this is still our focus.
The platform will include an in-browser editor for features which supports multiple collaborators. Editing the code that executes the feature will not be supported. However, the platform will be able to aggregate feature execution reports from the distinct Cucumber flavors, including SpecFlow, the .Net port of Cucumber.
Multiple offerings will be available, including a free version for open source and a cloud-hosted version as well as a private version running on a local server. Prices and model for the paid licences have not been published yet. For the time being interested customers can sign up for announcements on Cucumber Pro. Beta users will have access some time in Q4 2013 and public accessed is expected for Q1 2014.
Cucumber Pro was founded by the core maintainers of the distinct Cucumber flavors: Matt Wynne (Cucumber-Ruby), Julien Biezemans (Cucumber-JS) and Aslak Hellesøy (Cucumber-JVM). Matt previously developed Relish, an online app for publishing and sharing Cucumber features but lacked the editing and reporting capabilities now unveiled for Cucumber Pro. Matt announced that migration guides will be provided, and reduced prices will be offered to existing paid Relish accounts.