What's Yeoman?
Yeoman helps you kickstart new projects, prescribing best practices and tools to help you stay productive.
To do so, we provide a generator ecosystem. A generator is basically a plugin that can be run with the yo command to scaffold complete projects or useful parts.
Through our official Generators, we promote the "Yeoman workflow". This workflow is a robust and opinionated client-side stack, comprising tools and frameworks that can help developers quickly build beautiful web applications. We take care of providing everything needed to get started without any of the normal headaches associated with a manual setup.
With a modular architecture that can scale out of the box, we leverage the success and lessons learned from several open-source communities to ensure the stack developers use is as intelligent as possible.
As firm believers in good documentation and well thought out build processes, Yeoman includes support for linting, testing, minification and much more, so developers can focus on solutions rather than worrying about the little things.
Tools
The Yeoman workflow is comprised of three types of tools for improving your productivity and satisfaction when building a web app: the scaffolding tool (yo), the build tool (Grunt, Gulp, etc) and the package manager (like Bower and npm).
YOyo scaffolds out a new application, writing your Grunt configuration and pulling in relevant Grunt tasks and Bower dependencies that you might need for your build. Grunt, Gulp, etcThe Build System is used to build, preview and test your project. Grunt and Gulp are two popular options. Bower, npm, etcThe Package Manager is used for dependency management, so that you no longer have to manually download and manage your scripts. Bower and npm are two popular options. All three of these tools are developed and maintained separately, but work well together as part of our prescribed workflow for keeping you effective.
More on Tooling
To learn more about the current developer tooling eco-system, you may be interested in watching Paul's talk on "Better Web App Development Through Tooling" or Addy's Yeoman session on Google Developers Live.