Back in April this year when the acquisition talks between Cucumber and SmartBear started to get serious, the most urgent question for all of us was whether our visions for a commercial product to support Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) were aligned. SmartBear had already acquired HipTest a year earlier, and the Cucumber team were building Jam. Could we join forces? Did we care about the same things?
While the HipTest team had been building a lightweight test management tool that helps teams transitioning to BDD, Jam was focussed on teams already using Cucumber (or Cucumber-family tools like SpecFlow, Behat etc.), supporting a workflow to involve the whole team in defining the right specifications. We were coming at the same problem from different angles but we were all agreed: BDD is transformative for teams and we want as many people as possible to discover the sheer joy of working this way.
After the acquisition, the Cucumber team travelled to Besançon, France: home of the HipTest team. In-between gorging ourselves on the finest cheeses on planet earth, we got into the details.
It was clear that of the two products, HipTest had the lead in terms of market share. We agreed to use HipTest and its user-base as our starting point and bring in the features we all loved from Jam. The team were already working on Git integration to automatically render gorgeous living documentation. The conversation workflow was next, letting the whole team collaborate on the single hardest part of software development: deciding precisely what to build.
We’re calling the result CucumberStudio.
We won’t pretend this is perfect. Not yet. Bringing two teams and products together has been great fun and a learning experience for all of us. We’re also learning a lot from our customers, getting great feedback to guide us towards becoming the world’s number one collaboration platform for BDD teams.
A year ago we had just three full-time developers working on Jam. Now there are about thirty of us all pushing this thing forward across the open-source, commercial tools, and BDD practice advocacy. We’re excited about what we can build in 2020!
Here’s what you can expect next:
A single source of truth with CucumberStudio
Studio's new git integration feature means your living documentation is always up to date. No more emailing documents around and worrying if everyone has the latest version. You’ll have a single source of truth, verified on every run of your automated tests.
A brand new cucumber.io
Our website has had a ground-up rebuild to make it easier for you to find the tools and resources you need. You can now explore all the Cucumber tools in one place, and find our newest articles, podcasts, videos, and more on the new Cucumber blog. As ever, the Cucumber documentation will be open to feedback and edits from the community.
More Cucumber for Jira
We released the first iteration of Cucumber for Jira last months and have been overwhelmed with feedback. The team are iterating hard and you can expect this fledgling product to take leaps and bounds next year.
Cucumber School 2.0
We’re re-launching Cucumber School Online, as a free complement to our world-class live BDD & Cucumber classes. We’ll be producing and releasing new videos for the online learning platform throughout 2020.
We are really excited about the future of Cucumber and hope you will continue to support us throughout this new journey!
To find out more. join Steve Tooke, Senior Product Manager, CucumberStudio and Laurent Py, VP of Products at SmartBear for our upcoming webinar: Introducing CucumberStudio and What to Expect from Cucumber in 2020 on Friday, December 13th. Register Now.