SmartBear's Attempt to Commercialize Cucumber for E2E test automation Failed Badly*
The reason: a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of E2E test automation—ironically, for a large E2E test automation tool vendor.
On 2019-06-25, SmartBear, a big commercial tool vendor in the E2E test automation field, announced that it acquired Cucumber.
On 2023-02-24, Matt Wynne — the last of Cucumber’s co-founders who actively worked on the project — got laid off. He shared about it in this blog post: “Every ending is a new beginning”.
“After ten years building a company around the Cucumber open source project, I suddenly find myself out of a job. I was laid off last Friday by SmartBear, who in June 2019 acquired the company I co-founded back in August 2013.
I figured we might be in the end-game, but I hadn’t expected it to come around so suddenly.” - Matt Wynee
On 2024-12-19 (last month), Matt Wynee announced on the Cucumber website that “Cucumber is back in Community Ownership”.
This means SmartBear's over four-year effort to commercialize Cucumber has completely failed, leading them to conclude that Cucumber holds no value for their business.
