Believe it or not, SpecFlow is one of those tools, where it is very exactly known when the first code line was written. It was 12th September, 2009. We had our regular yearly team event with TechTalk and after having a couple pints of beer and hours of chatting with my colleagues, I went up to my hotel room and made the first prototype. (The full story was published as an article in the NDC Magazine in 2011: “The birth of SpecFlow: Chronicles of an open source project” by Jonas Bandi and me.)

What has happened since then? A lot.

SpecFlow has grown out of nothing to the “de facto” standard BDD tool for .NET. We have got more than 90.000 downloads on NuGet, more than 50.000 on Visual Studio Gallery. The 34 contributors have made more than 1.000 commits and I have added more than one million lines of code to the project.

At TechTalk, we have completed many projects with BDD and SpecFlow, started to offer courses and consulting in agile testing and requirement analysis and created our visual product planning tool called SpecLog and the specialized SpecFlow test runner SpecRun. (Our team event this year will be tomorrow… who knows what comes…)

And what has happened to me in these 4 years? First of all, I’ve got two wonderful daughters: Borbála is just about two months younger than SpecFlow (BoDI, the embedded mini dependency injection framework in SpecFlow was named after her – I think I have never mentioned this to anyone yet); Veronika will have her first birthday in a few days. I think I could mark these 4 years as the learning years of a developer in his 30s – I learned a lot about the life of fathers with daughters, about BDD, agile, self-organizing teams and a lot-lot-lot about testing. I started a PhD in this topic and do a lot of coaching related to BDD, SpecFlow and agile software development. I have plenty of ideas, but so little time… I guess this is usual.

So SpecFlow is four and we are celebrating this by launching the renewed website. We updated the logo quite some time ago and finally I was able to finish the website too. Besides the design, the most important new feature is the documentation, mirrored from the GitHub wiki (it’s pretty interesting how you can do this, but I’ll explain this in another post). As the documentation is directly available on the website, it will be easier to find the content through the menu structure and with Google. I hope you will like it. (The link is of course still the same: http://www.specflow.org!)

Happy Birthday, SpecFlow!