The Raleigh-area Ruby Brigade February Meeting

Story-Driven Development with Cucumber

Software projects struggle to be on-spec, on-time and on-budget, and a major cause is miscommunication. As Martin Fowler says, there is a "yawning crevasse of doom" between "suits" and developers, full of misunderstanding. How can we make sure that there is mutual understanding, and that the software actually meets the needs of the problem while improving the business bottom line?

Into the fray leaps Cucumber, a business-readable domain-specific language (DSL) for expressing requirements as Agile user-stories, combined with an awesome Ruby library for executing those stories as integration tests. We'll cover the process of outside-in, story-driven development with Cucumber, how to write effective stories, and how to apply Cucumber to your Ruby project.


Sean Cribbs has been crafting web applications as Prime Motif, Inc. since 2007, primarily in Ruby, Erlang, and Javascript. An active open-source author and contributor, Sean has also been lead developer and release manager of the Ruby-based content management system, Radiant, since 2008. Sean blogs about technology on http://seancribbs.com..., tweets as @seancribbs, and can often be found attending or speaking at user groups near Raleigh-Durham, NC.