The End of Cucumber (As We Know It)

At the end of June, SmartBear has announced the acquisition of Cucumber Ltd., the company behind the open source software testing automation framework Cucumber. Cucumber is one of the tool the most adopted by the Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Agile testing community with over 30 million downloads.

This acquisition of Cucumber strengthens the BDD solutions that SmartBear has been building since the acquisition of HipTest, another platform for BDD, last year. Naturally, both management teams from SmartBear and Cucumber are saying that “The Cucumber community can count on our continued support and focus on open source tooling”, but as in many of these acquisitions, most of the efforts will be geared to develop the commercial side of the testing framework. The activity on GitHub around the open source version of the SoapUI or the discontinuation of LoadUI are clear examples of this behavior.