Koen De Hondt - Behaviour-Driven Development with Hera - 24 June 2026
At ESUG 2025, Hera was introduced as a BDD framework bringing full Gherkin expressiveness to Pharo. Since then, Hera has evolved significantly — both as a framework and as a tool adopted in real-world industrial settings. After a brief introduction to Gherkin for writing given-when-then scenarios, various aspects of Hera will be highlighted. A functional overview will set the scene, followed by a dive into the code to show how Hera maps Gherkin features and scenarios to Smalltalk classes and methods. During a live demo, example Gherkin scenarios for a simple Pharo Spec application will be written to explain the full scenario development cycle. Koen De Hondt has used Smalltalk since 1988, first as a student, then as an academic researcher, and then in industry. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1998). In the nineties and a few years after the turn of the century, he was one of the driving forces behind the Belgian Smalltalk User Group (BSUG)....