Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

mattwynne.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 81 posts

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#21

Post by yebyen »

bhaak wrote: post #8
UweSchmidt wrote: post #7

I 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…

We have Cucumber tests and Rspec tests in our repository. They are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Cucumber tests are integration tests and usually test only the happy path. In our case, a customer never sees those tests. OTOH for new developers, it's a very good way to find out how a given feature should work. Making a test in Cucumber for checkIfFriday() would be flagged in a code review. That's for a uni…

> One of the bigger problems I have with it is that discovering existing cucumber steps is hard.

When I was using Cucumber, we almost picked up Turnip to solve that one.

For anyone that doesn't know Cucumber, you have one global context for all expressive sentences. So if you say "I click on the big red button" then there has to be one reliable way to detect the big red button on whatever page you're on, and it has to be the same way in every context.

In Turnip, you can declare contexts (like namespaces or modules) that allow you to have the same expression mean different things in each context. Only problem is, Turnip is even more obscure than Cucumber, and even fewer people know what it is, let alone having used Cucumber well enough to understand what all that means and what Turnip is for.

The other problem being, having a single global context for understanding the meaning of words arranged into sentences was a very powerful tool for promoting reuse and expressive clarity: if you found yourself using the same utterance in two different contexts, it was expected that you'd clarify so they could be distinguished and understood separately in a context-free grammar.

Not needed anymore in Turnip, unless you're diligent about reaching for the existing modules that you've created. (On the other hand, having your test utterances sorted into modules makes it a lot easier to reach for them, among related utterances...)

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#23

Post by isensible »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #3

I really liked using specflow (a cucumber equivalent) for dotnet years ago. It comes into its own when you want to quickly multiply up the cases or build out scenarios from smaller steps. Even if you are unit testing and not using BDD it is useful. But it is an investment, especially if you need to move exisiting tests to it. Being able to write code for a single step requires decent decoupling through the test and t…

for .NET, LightBDD is much better than Specflow.

For LightBDD, developers write Given-When-Then tests in C#, and the test run spits out Gherkin style reports in various formats including a rather nice HTML page.

Chosing to use Specflow/LightBDD depends on how much you value the reports. At least with LightBDD, you are not forced to write the tests in the report format.

https://github.com/LightBDD

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#24

Post by rqtwteye »

Dayshine wrote: post #15

The 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.

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#25

Post by pydry »

sverhagen wrote: post #4
config_yml wrote: post #2

13 years ago when I started with Rails, we had a cucumber suite for one of the products we maintained. It was eventually abandoned, as developers didn't want to maintain it and the PM was not interesting in applying it either. I had never seen it on a project since, but still knew one or two people who were religious about it. Fast forward to yesterday, we were formatting product specification using ChatGPT and I tho…

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?

I find that the "gherkin" syntax is not really expressive enough to express requirements in a way that is interesting for the business.

The business therefore always loses interest.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#26

Post by rr888 »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #7

I 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…

We tried it once and the semi-tech SMEs had no desire to write cucumber code so it ended up being the developers who hated writing in a second language. No real benefit.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#27

Post by Gigachad »

Dayshine wrote: post #15

The 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.

This happens outside of America. I believe it’s to avoid the risk of the employee maliciously causing damage after being given the news.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#28

Post by Ekaros »

rqtwteye wrote: post #24
Dayshine wrote: post #15

The 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.

There is also paranoia. A lot of people believe that a laid off employee will immediately go against the company and do some kind of sabotage or leak secrets.

Does that mean they think they would themselves do that? And on other hand do they not trust their own systems to protect from these actions? Or being legally capable of suing employees?

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#29

Post by rgblambda »

sverhagen wrote: post #4
config_yml wrote: post #2

13 years ago when I started with Rails, we had a cucumber suite for one of the products we maintained. It was eventually abandoned, as developers didn't want to maintain it and the PM was not interesting in applying it either. I had never seen it on a project since, but still knew one or two people who were religious about it. Fast forward to yesterday, we were formatting product specification using ChatGPT and I tho…

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?

>then it turns out that those business folks aren't really interested in it

It's weird how business folks can just go "nope not doing that" to a process that was created to give them more say and doesn't make sense without them.

Re: Cucumber maintainer has been laid off

#30

Post by ceejayoz »

Gigachad wrote: post #27
Dayshine wrote: post #15

The 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.

This happens outside of America. I believe it’s to avoid the risk of the employee maliciously causing damage after being given the news.

Yes, but in the US, pay usually stops immediately when the login stops working. In much of the developed world there's a guaranteed notice period and severance, and often limitations on what situations you can fire for.
Post reply on HN