The monthly dose for BDD addicts… In August #bdd, #specflow and #cucumber stories from Eugen (Baeldung), The Cucumber team, Chris Parsons, John Ferguson Smart & Gaspar Nagy.
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Dear BDD Addicts,
Summer has almost gone, children prepare for the new school term. But learning does not end at school… there are always opportunities to discover new ideas, new practices. Also for BDD addicts… The training season has started, there are also many conferences where you can chat with other attendees about BDD, but keep in mind that a new project is also a good opportunity to learn something new. All you have to do is to make a log of the events and feelings you have had, review them afterwards in the light of the end result and try to make conclusions. Why not put them down in a blog post? I would be happy to share it with other addicts…
If you’ve got your experience report or see other interesting posts relating to BDD, please send it to bddaddict@specsolutions.eu.
Here is your monthly learning dose…
[Process] Use BDD in the prototyping phase
I am often asked if there are any areas or domains where BDD cannot be used. I guess this is a provocative question, so instead of giving a speculative answer I tell the truth – I have never seen a project where BDD could not help. Earlier I thought that the prototyping phase is something where BDD does not fit well. But after trying it out, I had to realize that this is not true. If a prototype has a potential business value, it is extremely useful to capture the business problem we try to solve. Maybe you will even realize after writing it down that the case does not even make sense.
So I was very happy to come across the post by Chris Parsons about this topic. Prototyping should not be chaotic!
Extreme YAGNI: How BDD nails your prototyping stage (Chris Parsons, @chrismdp)
[Process] BDD in the DevOps world
DevOps is usually considered a process of automated, fast release practice. If a feature that was coded today can be released within a few hours, it is hard to grasp what the role of quality assurance is. Only a few articles can be found on this topic. The post by John Ferguson Smart (the author of the ‘BDD in Action’ book) is a summary. It has a great start by stating: “Deploying a broken application faster will not make it any less broken”. Then it steps back to treat DevOps as a culture rather than a set of automation activities and suddenly the responsibilities of QA (and BDD) take shape.
The role of QA in a DevOps world (John Ferguson Smart, @wakaleo)
[Process] Their favorite BDD anti-patterns
The blog of the Cucumber team contains many interesting things to read and even more materials you can listen to. They have a history that can be traced back long where they have been fighting against the anti-patterns that may look good at first sight but slowly they are killing the productivity you wanted to achieve with BDD. (Maybe you remember the funny talk by Matt Wynne.)
This time they captured the most important anti-patterns in a blog post, and since the title says “part 1”, we can expect them to be continued soon.
Cucumber anti-patterns (part one) (Cucumber team, @cucumberbdd)
[Learn:Cucumber-JVM] REST API testing
I always like those practical, step-by-step tutorials that focus on a particular topic and give a detailed description of the solutions. REST API testing is not rocket science, but finding the first steps to start might be challenging. Eugen (Baeldung) has made it for us!
REST API Testing with Cucumber (Eugen, @baeldung)
[Learn:SpecFlow] Injecting your dependencies
The automation layer of a bit more complex application requires several components to work together. If these testing and production components are separated into different classes that might depend on each other, setting up the test dependencies might be challenging. The context injection feature of SpecFlow is here to help, but in some situations it is easier to use the dependency configuration of your application. In this post I am describing how to use SpecFlow with AutoFac or similar DI frameworks using the new infrastructure created in SpecFlow v2.1.
SpecFlow tips: Customizing dependency injection with Autofac (Gaspar Nagy, @gasparnagy)
