BDD with Cucumber and RSpec

This is a joint meetup with my other group - Silicon Valley Ruby Meetup. If you RSVPed here - you are all set to go. :-)

The subject of Paul's talk will be specific lessons learned from diving head-first into BDD with Cucumber and Rspec.

The aim of his talk is to share his journey with learning BDD and his attempt to "Eat the elephant" in manageable bites.

Topics will include what worked, what didn't, and what he would do differently. Paul will address the challenges facing those new to testing, and how refactoring proved unexpectedly effective at improving both design and coding skills.

For the broader audience, Paul will share lessons-learned on how the BDD methodology can help anyone improve communication and business focus.

The second part of Paul's talk will be a more academic perspective on how why BDD is the right methodology for Silicon Valley professionals to learn, right now. Paul will cite perspectives from:

"Domain Driven Design", by Eric Evans
"Decline and Fall of the American Programmer", by Ed Yourdon
"Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer", by Ed Yourdon
"Rashoman", the 1950's cinematic masterpiece from director Akira Kurosawa
"The Rspec Book" by Chelimsky, et.al.

Paul will conclude by stating his case on why BDD's "Emergent design" approach is a fundamental improvement over existing Silicon Valley application-development practices based on traditional engineering.

Bio
Paul Hamann is a twelve year valley veteran with a geeky passion for business and IT alignment. While at Andersen Consulting's Palo Alto Research center, Paul delivered one of the worlds first online portals for personal financial services. While at Vitria technology, Paul turned Vitria's integration-server product into the health care payer industry's platform of choice for both HIPAA compliance and consumer-driven health care initiatives. Paul's roles have spanned software development, marketing, and sales, but he's never strayed far from hands-on development and general Linux hacking. Combined with Paul's strong product development perspective,

Paul brings a solid academic and historical perspective on application development through his graduate work in MIS at the University of Virginia.

Paul leverages Ruby on Rails to help entrepreneurs and lean startups deliver great customer-focused software.