The monthly dose for BDD addicts…  In April stories by Joe Colantonio, Janet Gregory, Aslak Hellesøy, Chris Matts, Stephen McCafferty, Alan Parkinson & Jan Stenberg …

Subscribe to the monthly newsletter at http://bddaddict.com so that you never miss it! (Did you get the March issue?)

Dear BDD Addicts,

Cucumber is 10 years old! The team and the community celebrated this at the annual Cucumber conference called CukenFest. I had great days there with lots of interesting conference talks and discussions. (The talks have been recorded and will be published soon.) Day 2 was an open-space day, when we also talked about an upcoming change in the Gherkin language: introducing rules, to map the results of an example mapping session into feature files in a better way. This idea is still a piece of work in progress, but I will keep sharing the news about it.

April has been a hot and busy month for me – but now, I am sending you the monthly dose.

https://twitter.com/Prab_Bhopal/status/986987647259303942

[BDD] Ten years of Cucumber

As a part of the celebration of the 10th anniversary of Cucumber, Jan Stenberg made an interview with Aslak Hellesøy, the founder of Cucumber. In the interview, you will read a little bit about the history, but also about what BDD and Cucumber is today and what has changed over the last decade.

BDD Tool Cucumber is 10 Years Old: Q&A with its Founder Aslak Hellesøy (Aslak Hellesøy, @aslak_hellesoy; Jan Stenberg, @janstenberg)

[BDD] Given/When/Then on different levels

In the morning of the second day of CukenFest, I had a chance to have a coffee together with one of my well-respected mentors, Chris Matts. He is one of that guys whom I always learn something from. This time he was talking about applying BDD at different levels of the system. But these are not the pyramid levels we think about when we automate scenarios, but rather system design levels. Fortunately I don’t have to explain what he told me, because he recorded all the findings in a 4-part blog post series. It is not an easy read, but worth. This is the first post of the series.

BDD Done easy – The three levels of BDD (Chris Matts, @PapaChrisMatts)

[Agile Testing] Agile testing is not about shifting things

I’ve attended Janet Gregory’s agile testing course last month as a part of becoming a licensed trainer for the course. We talked about many interesting and important principles of agile testing during the three days, including the term “left shift”. I don’t use this term myself because I find this left-right thing confusing, but I was surprised that Janet also does not like it. Why? She summarized the reasons in a short blog post!

Shift Left – Why I Don’t Like the Term (Janet Gregory, @janetgregoryca)

[Agile Testing] Exploring the things beyond BDD

I think it is very important to state and highlight that automated tests or automated BDD tests are not necessarily the best way to address all aspects of the quality. A good test strategy uses multiple tools to find the best mix for the given circumstances. Exploratory testing is one of these “other” tools that works pretty well together with BDD, but unfortunately it is not used so often among the teams practicing BDD. The post by Alan Parkinson goes deeper into how these two techniques can work together.

Complementing BDD with Session-based Exploratory Testing(Alan Parkinson, @alan_parkinson)

[BDD] The editor’s voice

It’s hard to find a good title for a podcast where you have been interviewed. Anyway. Joe Colantonio makes the awesome Test Talks podcasts and he invited me to talk about our book with Seb Rose. So these are my thoughts on the discovery practices of BDD… (If you don’t have time to listen to it, here you can find Joe’s summary about it.)

Test Talks #197: Discovery Explore Behavior Using Examples with Gaspar Nagy (Gaspar Nagy, @gasparnagy; Joe Colantonio, @jcolantonio)

[SpecFlow] Browser compatibility checks

Implementing a proper web UI automation is difficult and takes quite a lot of efforts. In order to maximize the outcome of these efforts, typically the tests are executed on multiple browsers or even on a cloud-based automation service. This is usually done by executing the same test suite with different configurations. Stephen McCafferty shows how this can be done easier with SpecFlow+.

Targeting Multiple Browser with a Single Test (Stephen McCafferty, works at @techtalks)