Koen De Hondt - Behaviour-Driven Development
 with Hera

At ESUG 2025, Hera was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly — both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings.

After a brief introduction to Gherkin for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle.

Koen De Hondt has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG). In that time frame, he presented at ESUG conferences several times. In 2003, he left the Smalltalk community for other adventures. In 2023, he returned to the Smalltalk scene and started https://all-objects-all-the-time.st. He has been an active contributor to Pharo ever since. Software development tools are his main interest. He is the main author of the book “Application Building with Spec 2.0”.