Luckily escaping the BA strike and the newest volcano ash cloud, on Friday I safely arrived home from the Skills Matter Progressive.NET Tutorials in London.

This was the first time I visited this event and it was a great honor that Jonas and me had been invited to do two workshops about behavior-driven development (BDD) and SpecFlow.

I enjoyed the event very much. I also visited a lot of interesting tracks, but maybe the best was to meet so many enthusiastic and “progressive” developers. It helped me a lot to charge my batteries – to keep on thinking about new ideas and improvements in the development process and technologies.

Chris has written a short summary on our sessions, I don’t want to repeat him. I was very pleased that we got so much interest and positive feedback after the sessions. It was a pleasure to work with Jonas and thanks also for TechTalk’s support.

Let me highlight only two things about the BDD session.

The best part in it (again) was the acceptance criteria writing task, where the attendees had to write 2-3 (the most important) acceptance criteria about the shopping cart feature of a book shop application. The goal of the exercise was to discuss good/bad practices and patterns in formulating scenarios. We thought that the best way to learn these was to learn them on the basis of personal experience. But as we can never guarantee that the attendees will really make those mistakes that we would like to highlight, this is always risky. But it worked again! We didn’t have to show any prepared solution (to be honest we didn’t prepare any), we could explain and discuss a lot of interesting things through the samples the attendees came up with. It was amazing!

In the beginning of the workshop where we wanted to collect possible hopes and fears about BDD to be addresses during the sessions, we had another task as well. Usually we do this with yellow stickers but this time we made a last minute adaption to our process – making the session “progressive”… Instead of stickers, now we used a twitter – everyone could post comments with the term #prognetbdd that we displayed on the projector and discussed. It was a fun!