Writing Software not Code with Cucumber – slides from Ruby Hoedown

Hah! My last blog post was for slides when I presented last… I need to write more I think.

Anyways, I just finished presenting at the Ruby Hoedown. It was roughly the same talk I gave at Mountain West Ruby conf but with a lot more advanced material and content in general. It went somewhat okay. I think I went too fast leaving some people behind when I was racing through the “basics”. I had wanted to cover some of the more advanced topics that don’t get covered usually, but in the end I feel like the presentation came off as rushed and unfocused. It didn’t help that I was going off of 3 hours of sleep either. :/ Another issue was the color of my code slides, which looked awesome at MWRC but just didn’t project well on this projector- so, planning fail on my part. I apologize for failing to recognizing my audience and the sub-par delivery. Regardless, I’m glad I did it and I’d like to thank Jeremy for inviting me to speak. </presentation_retrospective>

The presentation was a little meta… I was using a sinatra app I wrote called CodeNote that allows audience members to follow along but not go ahead. A presenter is able to define the slides in a variant of Pat Nakajima’s awesome slidedown format. I also integrated it with twitter so that I could ask questions and people could respond to them via twitter to win a book. This explains the spamming of the #cucumber hash tag during my presentation. :) The meta part was that I showed how to test the twitter integration during the presentation. Writing a test for that involved using a webservice (twitter), AJAX, and running background jobs. I didn’t get into it nearly as much as I had hoped (which may be a good thing in retrospect) so if you are curious I would suggest checking out the code on github.

Here are the slides:

Note: Since SlideShare is lame now and won’t let you download the slides without an account here is a PDF copy of the slides if interested.

Writing Software not Code with Cucumber
View more presentations from Ben Mabey.
Posted at 2pm on 08/28/09 | Comments | Filed Under: Ruby
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Slides from Outside-In Development with Cucumber

I had great time presenting at Mountain West RubyConf. It was my first time presenting to a larger group and I was pretty happy how it all turned out. For those present I would love to get some feedback on how I could improve. I spoke on Cucumber and Outside-In development with it. Here is the actual blurb about the presentation:


Cucumber is a BDD tool that aids in outside-in development by executing plain-text features/stories as automated acceptance tests. Written in conjunction with the stakeholder, these Cucumber features clearly articulate business value and also serve as a practical guide throughout the development process: by explicitly outlining the expected outcomes of various scenarios developers know both where to begin and when they are finished. I will present the basic usage of Cucumber, primarily in the context of web applications, which will include a survey of the common tools used for simulated and automated browser-testing. Common questions and pitfalls that arise will also be discussed.

MountainWest decided to cut the presentation times down to 30 minutes this year. I think the new format was awesome and I hope they stick to it. However, I did have to cut some topics from my presentation. Namely, I wasn’t able to explain Selenium and Celerity so those interested in testing JS with Cucumber should take a look at webrat’s selenium adapter, Celerity, Culerity, and the Celeriry webrat adapter (work-in-progress). on github. I should also point out that you can use Watir or any other tool within Cucumber as well.

UPDATE

You can download the presentation over at Confreaks!

Note: Some of the code samples are not properly highlighted when viewing the presentation from slideshare.net so I would suggest downloading the PDF version.

Outside-In Development With Cucumber
View more presentations from Ben Mabey.

During the presentation I was serving up my slides with a little sinatra app called slide_server. (The app didn’t allow people to skip ahead in the presentation.) I’ll be putting that code on github for any of those interested. Many thanks to Brian Mitchel for helping me out with running the server during the presentation.

Posted at 5pm on 03/14/09 | Comments | Filed Under: Ruby, cucumber
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