Skills Matter and Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of the popular Cucumber BDD tool, have partnered to organise CukeUp!.

CukeUp! is taking place in London today (March 24th 2011). It's a one day conference packed with half hour talks about all things related to the Cucumber BDD tool and ecosystem.

Throughout the day, we will be publishing SkillsCast Video recordings of the talks, comprising of speaker footage, code and slides. You can find these SkillsCasts, by browsing the programme(below), and clicking on the 'more'... links.

For feedback and comments on CukeUp!, follow #cukeup on twitter. CukeUp! pictures will be published on flickr

Thursday 24th March 2011

Track 1    COMING SOON ....       10.00 - 10.30    KEYNOTE - ASLAK HELLESOY Aslak opens the conference with a keynote on Cucumber's history, community and the roadmap for Cucumber. more...        COMING SOON ....       10.45-11.15    BOOTSTRAPPING CUCUMBER Jan Brauer: How do you get a BDD setup up and running with a big PHP system, previously not designed for testability? What are the pitfalls and hiccups you are likely to encounter? How will your team response if you tell them to learn Ruby?Use Cucumber to pry open that oblong box your software is and discover the unspeakable. This talk explains how we at http://jimdo.com introduced Cucumber to automate the testing of user stories previously described in countless Excel Sheets, various emails and Trac tickets. more...     11.15-11.45    CUCUMBER ON THE JVM WITH GROOVY Richard Paul: Cucumber isn't a tool exclusively for the Ruby world. The JVM is a very popular development platform and you can leverage your existing skills by automating your scenarios with Java, or its expressive by closely related brother Groovy. more...     11.45-12.00    TEA, COFFEE & REFRESHMENTS     12.00-12.30    SPECFLOW Gaspar Nagy: SpecFlow is a tool from the Cucumber family, specialized for .NET ecosystem. SpecFlow uses the official Gherkin parser and provides integration to Visual Studio, MonoDevelop, NuGet and Silverlight. This session gives a brief introduction to using SpecFlow and shows the latest interesting features. It shows how easy is to get ready for the first automated specification in a .NET project. Last but not least, it highlights some ideas about future evolvement conceptions. more...        COMING SOON ....       13.30-14.00    FUNCTIONAL BDD Phil Trelford: F# is a powerful new .Net programming language from Microsoft bundled with Visual Studio 2010. This talk will look at how you can write shorter, safer, more readable step definitions with F# to test your .Net applications. Develop your test code interactively as scripts inside Visual Studio’s F# interactive window, then integrate with your continuous build with tests running under NUnit, XUnit, MbUnit or MsTest. more...     14.00-14.30    CUKESALAD Antony Marcano: As you write scenarios in Cucumber, you also need to maintain step-definitions. These files can become quite large (end therefore harder to maintain) or can become fragmented making reuse harder. more...        COMING SOON ....       15.00-15.30    CUCUMBER AND CHEF Stephen Nelson-Smith: The advent of modern programming frameworks such as Rails and Django, together with the ready availability of virtualisation, and the explosion of interest in configuration management tools such as Puppet and Chef has revolutionised the web operations world. more...     15.30-16.00    ADVANCED ACCEPTANCE TESTING W CAPYBAR Jonas Nicklas: Capybara is a tool written in Ruby to acceptance test web applications, it was written with Cucumber in mind, and the two are the bestest of friends. In this talk I will show off some of the lesser known features of Capybara and how to use them in tandem with cucumber to create readable and powerful features. I will demonstrate this by showing off a complicated cucumber feature and then showing how the steps can be implemented in an elegant way. more...        COMING SOON ....       16.15 - 16.45pm    FEATURE INJECTION Antony Marcano & Chris Matts: Feature Injection is an extention of the BDD family of tools to cover Business Analysis practices. Antony Marcano and Chris Matts will run a game that helps you understand how information flows in a project. The game builds on the idea that all value is in the output of a system. The game allows you to experience why you sometimes need to push rather than pull. more...

Track 2    COMING SOON ....              COMING SOON ....       10.45-11.15    WHAT MAKES A GOOD FEATURE FILE David De Florinier & Gojko Adzic: In this interactive workshop, Gojko and David will go through examples of good and bad feature files and distill with your help what makes a good feature file. We'll focus on topics such as domain language, technical specifications vs business processes, self-explanatory files, specifications vs scripts and similar. This will be a programming language agnostic session. more...     11.15-11.45    WIP, KANBAN AND WHOLE-TEAM BDD Perryn Fowler: This talk will aim to answer the following: How can you make BDD something that the whole team does, and not just the developers? How does it work when non coders are writing cucumber? What is Kanban? How can you use Kanban in software development? How does the 'wip' feature of cucumber help you answer all these questions? more...         12.00-12.30    DELIBERATE DISCOVERY Dan North & Elizabeth Keogh: In this talk, Liz and Dan introduce BDD from a new perspective, taking the focus away from the tools and scenarios and returning to the language, conversations and philosophies at its heart. With deliberate Discovery addressing our ignorance and misunderstanding across technology, people and process, and Real Options allowing us to focus on the risks inherent within each, this talk will help you to apply the BDD mindset and patterns across multiple scales, from the initial vision all the way to the code. more...        COMING SOON ....       13.30-14.00    CUCUMBER FOR STARTUPS Michael Nacos: Early stage web startups need to get a lot done. How do you combine development hyper-drive with changing business requirements and evolving infrastructure without sacrificing quality? Enter cuke. It's got a light side, a dark side and it keeps the universe together. Our universe consists of Rails, Erlang and unix servers. more...     14.00-14.30    CUCUMBER – SCALING UP Arti Mathanda & Richard Brown: Addressing the challenges of introducing Cucumber in a large organisation and across multiple teams. Realising the benefits of having acceptance tests as a means of checking completion. Bringing Cucumber in alongside existing work practices to aid adoption. more...        COMING SOON ....       15.00-15.30    REFUCTORING YOUR CUKES Matt Wynne: Cucumber aims to help business stakeholders and developers collaborate more effectively. That's great if you care about helping your project succeed, but what about the rest of us who just want to hang on to our damn jobs? more...     15.30-16.00    SONGKICK'S PATH DOWN THE CUCUMBER ROAD. Joseph Wilk : Songkick.com is a web based music startup which from an early age adopted Acceptance tests and Behaviour Driven Development as part of its development cycle. Key to this was the use of the Ruby based BDD framework Cucumber and the idea of working outside in. more...        COMING SOON ....       16.15-16.45    MANAGEMENT WITH CUCUMBER.FM Michal Czyż: Work on big projects (1000 scenarios and more)creates unique challenges in managing and maintaining scenarios. Using tags for attaching meta data information helps to make the scenarios maintainable. To make this possible I have written a tool called cucumber.fm - this gives possibility to parse information from feature files and freely aggregate and filter on meta information stored in tags. Together with cucumber.fm we are successfully using described techniques in Selleo across 3 different teams since June 2010 - currently on 5 projects. more...