You know Uncle Bob Martin, right? If you don’t, stop right now and check out what the author of Clean Code, and long-time software industry veteran, has to say about software development. In fact, even if you DO know him, it is always a good moment to read his words, and apply his advice.

Today, December 5, is his birthday, and not only did we give him a hug, but in honor of this man who has done so much for all of us as an industry, we’ve just released version 0.12.5 of Gitnesse.

Gitnesse is an open source acceptance testing tool heavily influenced by Uncle Bob’s seminal tool Fitnesse. It enables a project to store Cucumber feature stories in a git-based wiki such as Github, test them against your code, and then update the wiki with the latest test results.

We like to think of this as “round-trip solution engineering”. Unless you are using your acceptance tests as part of a feedback loop with your system’s customer, you are probably not really doing it right. Perhaps this indicates a “process smell”, when your are saying “I do not really see why to use Cucumber.” Just getting feature stories, and having them end up buried away in your code, is not a good way to increase visibility, and to improve the match between the solution you are building, and the solution the customer really needs.

This is exactly what Uncle Bob has been saying for years, and we’re just paying homage to the master by releasing a tool that takes a modern approach to these ideas. Take a look at Gitnesse, and help us make it better. The website is http://gitnesse.com, and all of the source code is of course on Github.

So please give Uncle Bob a hug for his birthday, and give your software project a great big hug too!