When I first mentioned Cucumber to a close member of the context-driven testing community, the reaction was “Oh, so you’re just entering manual scripted tests into a computer.” She’s South African, so it was more like, “You’re ent-ring scripted tastes into the computah!” (Ya, she knows who she is.)  Though I felt her pings of discontent quickly, the answer was — “Well ya, I guess…”

In the tools world, Cucumber is the blood relative of both your normal manually-scripted tests and, say, FIT or FitNesse, with a bent toward integration tests (if that’s what you use it for). It’s manual scripted testing because you type your manual scripts into the computer; it’s automated testing because you also define pieces of code that match up with each line of each test. All Cucumber does is find the right match — and then happily goes chug, chug, chug.

It’s been a fun ride so far, and I don’t have many complaints. There is a question about whether to write imperative or declarative steps throughout your tests, as well as where to put your implicit state (we leave it in the browser). But as Kurt mentioned, we’ve been highly successful so far. I’d be interested to see if we have the same troubles that plague manual scripted tests over the long term, or if automating them keeps them in the public eye (i.e., continuous integration = continuous test fixing). We shall see.

In any case, it should be noted that Cucumber isn’t our only line of defense, and part of the reason Cucumber works is because of everything else going on around it. We have PMs doing acceptance testing, devs doing TDD and unit testing, I’m leading exploratory testing (which arguably the PMs are doing as well), and Cucumber is backing us up with integration tests that both the devs and I write. And that’s only functional: We have performance testing, user testing, smoke testing, and the whole nine-yards going on elsewhere throughout the company.

So ya, I’m proud to say that’s how we roll. If you’re interested, I’d encourage you to follow Kurt’s blog for more updates about the technical aspects of Intent Media, and to see how we’re building “the next great online advertising startup” (TM).

In no particular order:

1. New job! Today was my first day as a Software Quality Engineer at Intent Media, Inc. in Times Square. I can’t tell you anything about the company yet except to hint at their awesomeness, but I can tell you I’m extremely excited to be a part of this team. They’re a great group of people and I feel very welcome.
2. New Apartment! I moved to the Upper West Side July 1st, the new job cutting my commute down to less than fifteen minutes! I also have a new roommate, and she’s female — that’s a first. Though my stuff made it to the apartment by the 27th of June, I didn’t officially unpack everything until the 18th of July because I was…
3. Flying off to faraway places! The first place I visited was my hometown, Portland, Oregon. Though it was great to be home, family details prompted my visit making the trip bittersweet. But moving right along –
4. The second place I visited was the much more earthy Colorado Springs, Colorado. Not only did I get to spend time with awesome people (you know who you are), but I’m now on the board of directors for the Association for Software Testing and I am officially a CAST keynote speaker! The speech went great, and thank you everyone for your comments and suggestions!
5. I’m now on Twitter! You can find me here: http://twitter.com/timothyjcoulter (timothyjcoulter is blogging about cool stuff.)
   
6. I’m now living in Apple-land with a work-provided Macbook Pro. Later I’ll sync my iCal schedule with my iPhone so I can be on time for meetings at my new iJob! (Jokes aside, this is all new and exciting territory.)
7. Annnnnnd lastly, WAMU has become Chase, grumble grumble. Though this isn’t particularly life changing, Chase’s website is drastically lower quality when compared to WAMU’s website (where, of course, “quality is value to me“), and because of the differences, it greatly lowers my perception of my banks’ goods and services. I loved WAMU’s website, and I used it often. I feel like I’m being forced to use Chase, which… well, is pretty much true.

And I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting. Regardless, it’s been a crazy month with big changes and lots of excitment.