I must say. Man is pretty chill for someone being just cut off without a word.
wonder what he made in the initial acquisition
Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
11–20 of 81 posts
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#12I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…
Non-technical folks write complete IT systems in the nightmarish programming language of Excel macros.
I think the language used language isn't the main blocker here.
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that often the fate of Cucumber(-like) projects: you start with the promise of high abstractions that the whole company can work with or reason about, you invest a bunch of time to bridge the gap to the underlying implementation, then it turns out that those business folks aren't really interested in it, so developers hold the bag, and bridging the abstraction gap becomes a cost with little benefit?
The same thing happens with BI platforms. Everyone asks for a tool that business folks can use, developers go through all the effort in creating data integrations, then they turn around and ask the developers to just make the reports they wanted anyways. If that's how it was going to be, there's a lot of simpler solutions than a full blown BI platform...
I have seen this repeated a lot here on HN. Since my industry is at least 10 years behind everyone else we are now getting these directives. Execs/managers say we want to put the tools directly in the hands of the users. The project is going to be failure in that sense though because nothing is oriented to do that. Everything from our change control process to the UI is a blocker. The execs keep shouting "it needs to be simpler!" on a process that's decidedly not simple. I'm not interested in leading a paradigm shift destined to fail from my small underfunded department at a megacorp so I switched projects :/
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#14Like many others here, I haven't used Cucumber in a while, but back when I did, I went a couple to workshops that Matt ran, exploring BDD.
Certainly laying someone off when they are on holiday feels like a dick move, I guess that's corporates for you. I'd be interested in Aslak's viewpoint, as I'm guessing he's still there, and may well be the source of Matt's confidence that community assets will be handed over to the community.
But I'm glad Matt is reasonably happy. I'm absolutely certain his next venture will be successful, and that SmartBear lost a very valuable asset here.
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#15The American way of firing people with no notice and cutting off their logins instantly is so strange.
Is saving a tiny bit of money that much more important than a smooth handover? Or are employees just not willing to work their notice periods?
It sounds like in this case it's actively going to hurt the business.
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#16The American way of firing people with no notice and cutting off their logins instantly is so strange. Is saving a tiny bit of money that much more important than a smooth handover? Or are employees just not willing to work their notice periods? It sounds like in this case it's actively going to hurt the business.
Usually if it’s a layoff (without cause) and the employee does not have special powers (officer of company) a long notice is given to support a transition. A compensation package which requires signing a contract is the incentive for the employee to cooperate.
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#17Like many others here, I haven't used Cucumber in a while, but back when I did, I went a couple to workshops that Matt ran, exploring BDD. Certainly laying someone off when they are on holiday feels like a dick move, I guess that's corporates for you. I'd be interested in Aslak's viewpoint, as I'm guessing he's still there, and may well be the source of Matt's confidence that community assets will be handed over to t…
[deleted]
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#18I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…
Non-technical folks write complete IT systems in the nightmarish programming language of Excel macros. I think the language used language isn't the main blocker here.
yeah and than they argue that they can't program.
or that they can't write down pseudocode of their excel macros.
but they use way more complex if/elseif/else statements than everybody. they know how to use the ridiculousness of a vlookup.
and than some of these guys figured out to use powerfx via power apps another behemoth of a excel kind of syntax and they still don't think tey can program.
language is definitly not the blocker. heck there are even people who write brainfuck, just to have fun.
I mean yeah cucumber is probably not the future of programming.
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#19I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…
I've never seen Cucumber used in a big project after having done contract work for a long time but the idea of having user stories defined in a systematic way that's only used as extra context / documentation for complex features is useful. That would be aimed at developers and it would live near the real test code so it's not necessarily a direct implementation of how Cucumber is intended.
For more basic things it's overkill, certain languages almost give you the same benefit with code itself.
For example, here's a real user sign in controller test from Rails:
test "doesn't send email for an unknown user" do
post sign_in_path, params: { email: "idontexist@example.com" }
assert_enqueued_emails 0
assert flash[:alert]
assert_response :unprocessable_entity
end
Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off
#20I have used Cucumber in various projects, but haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing it all work out. - No one wanted to "collaborate", or check a "documentation" based on the Cucumber code . Yes, it's code, it lives in an IDE, in git, and non-technical folks just generally don't deal with that world. No one in my projects ever even brought such an idea up. Non-technical folks looked at our Cucumber code as in "what…
This is why we need better tools which will give benefits for the added complexity. If you need to create both the feature files AND the code, it's just complexity with little benefits. But frameworks like https://github.com/karatelabs/karate or https://github.com/Endava/cats are hiding this complexity and remove the code layer entirely. Which, in my view, this is where you need to be in 2023, particularly for API testing.