Dear BDD Addicts,

This is my last week before Christmas vacation, after the autumn rush I am trying to catch up will all the things I had to delay, like finishing the newsletter, the last one for this year.

To make the year ending even more special, most probably we will got the 800th registration for the newsletter. This is a big positive feedback for me and it keeps me encouraged to focus, speak and share content about BDD. This newsletter is not mine though, but it is ours. So feel free to share your comments, feedback or any interesting articles you’ve read (or you have written!) about BDD, Cucumber, SpecFlow, test automation and agile testing by dropping a mail to bddaddict@specsolutions.eu.

But now… here is the dose for the holidays.

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[Dev] Is exploring new technologies useful for your productivity?

On one of my trips I had a chat with a guy on the plane. It turned out that he had quite an extreme vision about how software people work. I had to turn him down that very few of us work on Facebook, IOS or Bitcoin. Most of us just work on “ususal” business applications where most of the time we need to use a known technology. It was pretty weird to say that though and he caught me immediately. “Why did you spend your time teaching others in another country if it is all boring?”, he asked. It’s obviously not boring, but rather creative. We can explore new technologies and this can even improve our productivity. But not always in a direct way. Gojko Adzic explains this through his own examples.

Deliberate side-products (Gojko Adzic, @gojkoadzic)

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[Agile Testing] Agile testing influencer born

I have been to the Agile Testing Days conference a few times and it has always been a good (and exhausting) experience. It’s more than a conference actually. This year I missed it so I was really pleased to read the summary by Elisabeth Hocke. But it is more than a regular conference summary as this year she has been chosen to get the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person (MIATPP) award. Congratulations Elisabeth and keep up the good work!

Agile Testing Days 2019 – About Community, Becoming MIATPP and Keynoting as Learning Partners (Elisabeth Hocke, @lisihocke)

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[BDD] SpecFlow support for Gherkin v6 and what are those changes anyway

Despite the current version of Gherkin (v6), the syntax for documenting requirements using the Given-When-Then format has not really changed until recently. Gherkin v6 is backwards compatible, but it introduces a few new features that might be useful for all BDD practitioners. These changes are supported by the new SpecFlow v3.1 release.

Gherkin6 rule support in SpecFlow v3.1  (Gaspar Nagy, @gasparnagy)

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[Automation] Automation success is not automatic

I regularly visit companies who are about to adopt BDD. They are interested in the “BDD costs” which is a difficult problem to address. I don’t think that BDD comes with an extra cost once you have been through with the initial learning period, but usually BDD lights up the quality and testing issues of the project and therefore it is usually introduced together with “proper” test automation. Proper test automation is not for free, but it comes with great benefits in return. Angie Jones shared her thoughts about how test automation could be done better. These suggestions work also well with BDD.

3 ways to get test automation done within your sprints (Angie Jones, @techgirl1908)

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[BDD] Why is BDD still important?

10 years ago, when I started working with BDD, I did not know whether this would be a short-term hype only or something that would remain and build into the usual agile toolset. Why are people and projects still interested in BDD? Evgeny Tkachenko talks about this in his post.

That is why BDD is trending (Evgeny Tkachenko, linkedin:evgenytka4enko)