The monthly dose for BDD addicts… In October #bdd, #specflow and #cucumber stories from Nicolas Fränkel, Marcus Hammarberg, Chris Parsons, Alister Scott & Gaspar Nagy.
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Dear BDD Addicts,
October has been a conference month for me. This month I happened to participate in four conferences as a speaker. At the UCAAT conference, my presentation was the last one at the end of a very long day, it started after 5pm. Everyone – including myself – was half-dead already at that time, so it was pretty challenging to take the attention to the topic of combining property-based testing and BDD (see the link to the related post below). And the conference season is still not over, BDDX (Agile Tesing and BDD eXchange) is just coming next week.
Have you also attended any conference, have you seen an interesting topic that you would like to share with other BDD addicts? Please send me the link to the presentation or article at bddaddict@specsolutions.eu and I will include it into one of the upcoming newsletters.
But now, let’s see your dose from October…
Checking slides just before my talk at the Agilia Budapest Conference, 12th October 2016, Image source: http://agiliabudapest.com/
[Process] Where do the details go?
Putting every detail makes things easy for the first time. You put all necessary data and all UI interaction into the scenario and you can quickly get it automated with a few dumb step definitions. This works when you have a few such scenarios. But in the longer run… this is a maintenance debt. It is a trap.
Many articles and posts have been written about this topic already — you can also find a few even in the previous issues of the BDD Addict Newsletter. The bottom line is that you have to express them in the functional level of your domain and eliminate the irrelevant details, in order to make your scenarios readable and maintainable. Ops. Eliminate. How can you do that? Where do those details go? Markus is here with his tuba to answer this back from 2013.
Cucumber / SpecFlow pro tip: push HOW down (Marcus Hammarberg, @marcusoftnet)
[UI Testing] Don’t do that, do this instead
The post of Alister Scott does not really need big introduction. It is a clear, straightforward “Don’t do that, do this instead” style bost with concrete examples. It contains 5 very good suggestions for UI automation.
Five automated acceptance test anti-patterns (Alister Scott, @watirmelon)
[Test-driven] TDD from a different perspective
I have already included another great post of Chris Parsons in August. This is another favorite of mine from him. It is sometimes not so easy to see the adaptability and the benefits of TDD or generally test-first development. You know this feeling probably: “it cannot be used in our project, because …”. I think there should be no better excuse for not using TDD would be game development. As Chris is expert in both fields, an authentic view is coming…
Why video game coders don’t use TDD, and why it matters (Chris Parsons, @chrismdp)
Image source: http://chrismdp.com/
[Test Automation] Testing business rules
Property-based testing (PBT) uses abstract formulas to declare expectations for the output values given some constraints on the input. The PBT tools try to disproof that the application fulfills these requirements by taking samples from the valid input value space.
In this post I have described an experiment about how to combine BDD with PBT.
Property-based BDD Examples with SpecFlow and FsCheck (Gaspar Nagy, @gasparnagy)
[Learn/Cucumber] Automating web applications with Cucumber JVM — powered up with dependency injection
While the scenario that is used in the following article as an example is more like a smoke test than specification, but besides that, this article shows a concrete example of a nicely layered web automation solution with page objects. It also shows how the DI integration of Cucumber JVM works and how to configure the web driver and the pages with Spring.
Starting with Cucumber for end-to-end testing (Nicolas Fränkel, @nicolas_frankel)
