The monthly dose for BDD addicts…  In June & July stories by Sam Hatoum, Angie Jones, Alister Scott, Thomas Sundberg & Steve Tooke  …

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Dear BDD Addicts,

It has not been a classic “hot summer” here this year so far, but it is quite enjoyable, warm but not hot with refreshing rain showers. We have just had a perfect week in the mountains and I hope you will also find time to rest… Don’t forget that well-written scenarios can help you to join back the project, so there is nothing to worry about. But even during your vacation you can show your addicton with the following out-of-office auto-reply… (thx to Jordi for the idea)

Scenario: Out of office

  Given I am on vacation

  When you send me a message

  Then your mail will be answered on the <date of first work day> when I am back

But if you are still at work, here is your dose…

Source: unsplash.com, (by J.Kelly Brito)

[BDD] Example mapping: the very first

Starting something new is never easy. If it is related to development process, then it is even harder. Many BDD practitioners have discovered that discussing illustrative examples and formulating them to Given-When-Then scenarios at the same time with the same set of people is not necessarily the best. It is better to focus on finding (or better: discovering) the illustrative examples first. For this purpose, a useful technique is called “Example Mapping” (described by Matt Wynne first, we also discuss it in detail in our “Discovery” book). Steve Tooke collected a set of useful steps to get started with example mapping…

Your first Example Mapping session (Steve Tooke, @tooky)

[Testing] Zero bug is not bug free

Teams waste a lot of time and effort for dealing (or not dealing) with bugs. It is obvious that every bug that has been found has to be handled somehow, but in many cases the way you handle it might have a significant implication of the “cost” of the bug. Sam Hatoum summarizes the zero-bug strategy and how he applied it to a project at BBC.

Zero-Bug Software Development (Sam Hatoum, @sam_hatoum)

Source: unsplash.com (by Nowshad Arefin)

[Learn:Cucumber JVM] Transform Data Tables with Cucumber JVM 3

A massive amount of data makes the scenarios unreadable and unmaintainable. But even with smaller data sets the automation code can get messy, if you directly access the data table rows and cells from all across your code. The data table transformation helpers can improve the code readability and maintainability. Thomas Sundberg shows which options we have for this in Cucumber JVM 3 (Java)..

Data tables in Cucumber 3 (Thomas Sundberg, @thomassundberg)

[Learn:Cucumber JVM] Drive REST API with Rest-Assured

Testing a REST Wep API might sound complicated, because there are so many things to take care of: HTTP methods, response codes, serializing/deserializing message body, headers, authentication, cookies, https, … A good framework can be very helpful. Angie Jones introduces us to Rest-Assured, a Java framework for REST API testing.

Rest-Assured with Cucumber: Using BDD for Web Services Automation(Angie Jones, @techgirl1908)

[Testing] Tests with configurable behavior

Feature toggles are a very simple concept for changing the application behavior depending on some setting, like for A/B testing, canary releases or just as an easy rollback strategy. Such dynamic behavior can also be useful for testing, especially for end-to-end tests. Alister Scott talks about when and how feature toggles should be added to test code.

Feature Toggles for Automated e2e Tests (Alister Scott, @watirmelon)