Kevin Liddle wrote an interesting post this morning, making a case against Cucumber. Like many people who hate on Cucumber, I think he misses the point by a little ways. Allow me to mount a defense of Cucumber by slightly editing some of his stories…

As organizations grow in size, it is common for departments to feel like they are being short-changed on access to engineering resources. One response to this is to dedicate engineering resources to specific departments, either exclusively or as a primary responsibility. Because the term “silo” has negative business connotations, some companies prefer to use the term “swim-lanes” to describe this setup. This metaphor approaches engineering as a swimming pool, with sub-teams segregated by their primary stakeholder. When all the teams are co-located and there is daily conversation between them, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that they really are not information silos. However, this belief is wrong for a number of reasons…

A short time back I wrote a post about how QA is essentially an external support for a dysfunctional software development process. Today I’ll try to explain one particular family of dysfunctions, and how they impact not only code quality, but team morale, and overall productivity…