A few of us have been talking and have decided to start the Columbus ATDD Developers Group. If you’re in the Central Ohio area and you use tools like Cucumber and SpecFlow, believe that testing is not just for QA people, or if acceptance test driven development sounds interesting to you, then this group may be for you. This is a developer-focused group, so expect to learn things about how to write code using BDD testing tools, design patterns and practices, how acceptance tests mesh with your unit tests, and other developer topics. QA people are always welcome too, especially the technical-minded ones! Absolutely no experience is required, just come ready to learn.

Testing is not just for QA people, and BDD testing tools like Cucumber and SpecFlow have really helped me speak to business people, BAs, and testers with a common language and automate acceptance testing for my features. This hasn’t all been easy, and I’ve had to learn a new set of workflows, tools, and patterns. I found that I’ve asked a lot of questions about agile testing and BDD tools on Twitter and I’ve called people up when I’ve had questions on how to do things, and having those connections have really helped me out as I work through the learning process.

We are going to meet on the 1st Thursday of the month from 11:30-12:30 at various locations around Columbus. We’ll probably move the group around so that the same people don’t get stuck with the drive every month. This is an informal group so we’ll have open discussions as well as presentations and people showing their code. We want to hear everyone’s questions and ideas.

Our first meeting will be Thursday, March 1 from 11:30-12:30 at IGS Energy in Dublin. We will have an open space style discussion about Adopting ATDD in Your Organization. Some of us are far along down this path and some are just starting out, and we can all learn a lot from each other’s experiences. So come with your questions and ideas to share. And because IGS Energy is awesome, they will hook you up with free pizza and pop.

If you want to keep up with the group, we are in all the usual places:

• Blog (we’ll post meeting announcements as well as guest posts about ATDD topics!) - http://columbusatdd.wordpress.com
• Twitter - @ColumbusATDD
• Google group

I probably won’t post meeting announcements on my blog, so go follow the RSS feed on the blog.

Hope to see some of you there!