On this day, 6 years ago I started to work on a Cucumber-like BDD framework for .NET, so 10th September is the birthday of SpecFlow, if open-source projects have such. Six years are a long time and many things have happened, but I don’t want to go through this in this post. I don’t want to write too much about the last year, either, where we started to work on SpecFlow v2, but we still could not release it.

The big news is that this summer I decided to change the way I work and try to dedicate much more of my time to SpecFlow and BDD as an independent consultant/coach/trainer/coder.

TechTalk, my former company that helped start and develop the open-source product, will keep supporting the SpecFlow community by running and maintaining specflow.org, improving documentation, organizing trainings and maintaining/developing SpecFlow+, the enterprise extension tools for SpecFlow. We are keeping a good relationship.

Mainly, I am going to focus on maintaining the open-source part, conducting trainings and supporting or coaching teams who want to get out even more from using BDD. In the last years, I have helped teams onboard SpecFlow/BDD, solve domain specific problems, make their automation layer more maintainable and improve automation infrastructure. Now I can do this full-time.

Currently I’m pretty busy establishing this new business. Setting up a small office in our house and trying to get enough assignments that are necessary for the stable flow. It is difficult to make predictions, but I hope I will have more time to invest in the open-source project from October. Please be patient.

If you like SpecFlow and are interested in making it even better, you can help, like many people have helped in the last 6 years by contributing, writing blog posts, introducing it to their companies or just rate it in the Visual Studio gallery. Now you can also help by attending my courses (over 60 people have been trained over the last two years), asking for custom extensions or donated feature implementations and making support/coaching agreements with me.

Happy birthday, SpecFlow!

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Please contact me with any questions and ideas.

Next SpecFlow course dates:

• September 28-30, Budapest
• October 5-7, London
• October 19-21, Vienna
• November 2-4, New York City by Chris Roff
• November 9-11, Kiev
• February 8-10 2016, Oslo