sharedinbox.com – Day 4

If you haven’t heard of the technique “behaviour driven development” before, you might be interested to know a little more about how we develop a feature from scratch.

Before writing any code, or designing any screens, we start with a story. Here’s one of the real stories that we started with on sharedinbox.com:

We use some software called Cucumber to simulate each one of the steps above. It’s almost like a real user clicking around on the site, trying out the features to see if they work. We run the story through Cucumber over and over again; each time a step doesn’t work, we add the code and screens to make it succeed or “pass”. The feature is finished once all of the steps are passing.

All of these stories are run through automatically every time we make a change or add a new feature, so we always know that all the features we’ve made are working as originally intended. The end result is a kind of instruction manual that picks up the product and checks everything works just right every time you use it. Great really!

More fun working on sharedinbox today:

Shared Inbox Day 4 from Pigment on Vimeo.