Bryan Helmkamp

I’m very happy to report that The RSpec Book, which I’ve been collaborating on, is now available for sale as a Beta Book from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. David Chelimsky posted an announcement to the rspec-users mailing list which sums it up quite well. To quote:

On behalf of all the authors, I’d like to extend a special thank you to all of you who have contributed to the software and the conversation around RSpec, Cucumber, and BDD in general. RSpec would be nothing without the community that has evolved around it, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

Enjoy! And if you do pick it up, please let us know what you think. We’re eager to improve it based on the feedback we get.

Today I’d like to announce the first real release of features2cards 0.1.1. The code has been sitting in my GitHub repository for awhile now, but I thought it was time to give it a formal release announcement.

features2cards is a simple tool to generate a printable PDF of scenario cards from Cucumber feature files. At weplay, we use this at the start of each sprint to get out Scrum task board up-to-date. Interally, features2cards uses the Cucumber feature parser and Prawn for PDF generation (in native Ruby!).

I’ve uploaded the gem and you should be able to install it off RubyForge very soon:

sudo gem install features2cards

Here’s how you use it:

features2cards features/scale_rails.feature

This will generate a file called cards.pdf in the current directory. Open that up, print it, and you’ve got cards ready to be chopped up and stuck to your Agile task board.

That’s all there is to it for now. Fork away. It’s only 150 lines including whitespace. I’d be happy to add additional formats, color support and other enhancements.

Special thanks to Luke Melia. His pdf-storycards project inspired this.