I have wanted to setup a blog for awhile and I am glad to have finally done it. I love programming and want to share cool things when I discover them. My intention for this blog is to have a place to record things that I find useful so that I can find them when I need them again later. Hopefully, others will find them useful too.

So, who am I? I’m a Kiwi living in London. Which is to say I was born and raised in Hastings, New Zealand, and have spent most of my adult life living and working in London. I’m a Christian. I’m married - to Birgit - and we really love this city. The plan has always been to go back to New Zealand, but we keep saying, “in another five years.”

I have wanted to setup a blog for awhile and I am glad to have finally done it. I love programming and want to share cool things when I discover them. My intention for this blog is to have a place to record things that I find useful so that I can find them when I need them again later. Hopefully, others will find them useful too.

So, who am I? I’m a Kiwi living in London. Which is to say I was born and raised in Hastings, New Zealand, and have spent most of my adult life living and working in London. I’m a Christian. I’m married - to Birgit - and we really love this city. The plan has always been to go back to New Zealand, but we keep saying, “in another five years.”

I’m a contract .Net programmer, working at Parliament right now with a great team. We have all really embraced agile development and are enjoying learning about doing that with automated testing, including things like Given When Then scenarios and Selenium testing. I am a particular proponent of Acceptance Test Driven Development, and the use of subcutaneous tests to drive development. I’m intending to blog about these topics.

Last year I became a contributor to BDDfy, an open source BDD framework which aims to be “the simplest BDD framework EVER!” I tried a number of other BDD frameworks first, but they all seemed to impose a particular syntax, base class, or testing framework, which would require me to change the way that I write my tests. When I came across BDDfy I was really impressed with how flexible and powerful it was. Its creator, Mehdi Khalili, is a really smart guy, and has written a framework that is convention based, extensible, offers a number of different APIs, runs on any testing framework (or none!), and works with how you want to write your tests. Its reporting is particularly strong and has become the cornerstone of our acceptance test driven agile process at work and drives the subcutaneous and Selenium tests for a large MVC3 project. Mehdi would add my feature requests within hours sometimes, and I got to know him quite well through that, and eventually joined the project.

Recently, Mehdi and I have been independently doing a lot of Selenium testing, and both felt that there was a need for a framework that would make things easier in this area. We decided to setup a new project called Seleno which aims to do that, and have just started working on it. Mehdi is hoping to show some early bits at his “Automated UI testing done right!” talk at DDD Sydney at the end of June. The two projects will both be hosted on github, under the umbrella of TestStack.

So, there you go. Hello World.