We launched Deveroom two month ago. It is time now to stop for a moment and have a look at where we are now and what the next steps for the product will be. We have great news to share.

Where is Deveroom now?

Our goal was to provide a Visual Studio extension that helps SpecFlow users to practice BDD regardless their project size, SpecFlow version or target framework. We were also committed to provide all core features for free. (Deveroom can be installed from Visual Studio, check this for details.)

With the version v1.2 we have reached an important milestone: Deveroom now supports all core features that people use:

• syntax coloring and basic editor features,
• keyword and step completion,
• navigating to step definitions and finding step definition usages,
• define step and add new feature file wizards,
• feature file code-behind generation for individual files or for the whole project.

These features now work with all SpecFlow versions from v1.9 up to SpecFlow v3, with all .NET platforms supported by SpecFlow, including .NET Core and both on Visual Studio 2017 and 2019.

In these two months we published 10 releases to prove that the DevOps monitoring and release pipeline we built is able to support continuous delivery.

But all of these are nothing to the support and the good feedback we have received from the users. Nearly 700 users used Deveroom in these first two months and more than 80% of them were returning users.

Thank you for all your feedback and support!

But we are not finished yet. The goal was not only to have a VS extension that supports the basics, this was the homework only. There are plenty of exciting ideas that could make our BDD work easier or that could help to get the most out of the BDD process. But how do we get there?

What’s next?

We have got several comments that making Deveroom open-source could give people the chance to better contribute to reach our goals. And we have listened to that. Although probably at some point there will be some “pro” features as a commercial offering, but let’s do the core better together. So I am really happy to announce that

Deveroom is going to be open-sourced on GitHub!

There are a few preparation steps ahead but they will not take more than a few weeks. Stay tuned on the GitHub project (https://github.com/specsolutions/deveroom-visualstudio) and our twitter channel (@SpecSol_BDD) to get the latest updates.

I hope that Deveroom will not only become a project that encourages people to contribute but also it is going to be a publicly available showcase for using BDD in such a complex technical domain. Deveroom is developed using BDD!

Important: The https://github.com/specsolutions/deveroom-feedback project, where we have collected the Deveroom issues has been renamed to https://github.com/specsolutions/deveroom-visualstudio, with all the existing issues. Please use the new link (https://github.com/specsolutions/deveroom-visualstudio/issues) for providing feedback from now on!