The monthly dose for BDD addicts… In September stories by Wayne Ariola, Dr. Andrew Harrington, Sam Hatoum, Christian Maioli Mackeprang & John Ferguson Smart …

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Dear BDD Addicts,

This month I have been preparing for two new courses targeting good development practices. The “XP Today” course focuses on the values, principles and practices of eXtreme Programming and the “TDD Today” course concentrates on test-driven development and unit testing. During the preparation I stumbled across more dev-focused topics and included a few of these in the newsletter. I hope you will like them. If you have also seen a good article you want to share, please send me the link to bddaddict@specsolutions.eu.

And now, let the September dose come…

Source: unsplash.com (by Priscilla du Preez)

[Agile Testing] Tests backed up by quality goals

For a long time I have been pretty much annoyed with discussions or expectations on how many unit or integration tests we should have. I found these discussions pointless, but at that time I could not really understand why. For me one of the biggest eye-opener moments was when I realized that the problem with these discussions was that they focused on how you do testing and not on why. Because “why” brings you to the discussions on quality and the importance of the different quality aspects in your context. Unit tests are tools, not goals.

I like the post by Sam Hatoum on this topic, because it explains it using a simple but powerful analogy. Do you wear your jacket back-to-front? Read the article and see!

Is Your Testing Strategy Back-to-Front? (Sam Hatoum, @sam_hatoum)

Source: unsplash.com (by Rod Long)

[BDD] Scenarios of scenarios

BDD is a collaborative approach, but in many cases the automation aspect of it is led by developers or test automation engineers. As these people are used to work with programming languages, they tend to see BDD scenarios and Gherkin language also as a programming language, so they try to apply the same principles they use for coding. But these principles are not necessarily applicable there. John Ferguson Smart focuses on one of these problems in his post: how can we reuse Gherkin scenarios.

How can I reuse my gherkin scenarios? (John Ferguson Smart, @wakaleo)

Source: unsplash.com (by Jagoda Kondratiuk)

[Agile Testing] A pass-fail test status is not enough!

Wayne Ariola summarized his thoughts on the recently published study on continuous testing. This post is a good and interesting starting point to dig a bit more into the results of the study. You will find a few interesting facts, including what is the problem with test results that focus exclusively on the pass-fail status.

The Testing Practices and Metrics That Really Matter in Agile and DevOps (Wayne Ariola, @wayneariola)

[Dev] I see unmaintainable code!

At one of the conferences I got a T-shirt (I think from JetBrains) that says “I see dead code” on the front. I gave it to my wife and she seems to like it because she regularly wears it. It is funny to see an “I see dead code” statement from your wife’s T-shirt during lunch, but it always makes me think. Have I really written only well-maintainable code today?

Christian Maioli Mackeprang collected a longer list of things that can quickly lead to unmaintainable code. I recommend you to go through this list with your team on your next retrospective in order to find ways to improve your code quality.

Avoid these 35 habits that lead to unmaintainable code(Christian Maioli Mackeprang, Christian’s LinkedIn profile)

Source: alfasin.com

[Dev] Pair programming in the kindergarten

The book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum was one of my favorites many years ago (along with some other books of the author), so I was pretty much surprised when I found a pair programming article referring to that. The article was written by Laurie A. Williams and Robert R. Kessler from the University of Utah, but Dr. Andrew Harrington wrote a short summary of it if you want to get the essence quickly.

How to Pair Program (Dr. Andrew Harrington, website at Loyola University Chicago)

Source: unsplash.com (by Tyler Nix)

Gáspár Nagy on software

coach, trainer and bdd addict, creator of SpecFlow; owner of Spec Solutions