Dear BDD Addicts, The month since the last newsletter has passed very quickly. We did work a lot with Seb Rose to finish our Formulation book. We received very nice quotes about the book from our reviewers and we already have test copies for print. It has been a long time and I’m really glad that finally our second book has been completed. Yet we have to fix a few minor glitches we have found in the test print until the release date of …. [drumbeats] …1 MAY! In the meanwhile, here is your monthly dose…

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[BDD] Formulating scenarios to document APIs

The #GivenWhenThenWithStyle challenges, initiated and coordinated by Gojko Adzic provides interesting challenges. The one about formulating scenarios to document APIs was one of my interest so I suggested Gojko to include this to the series and offered to write the summary.

There are many projects that verify the business rules by automating the scenarios through the API of the application, but this challenge was about documenting the public API of the system for other developers. But how should we compose the scenarios that talk about JSON and HTTP in a way that they don’t get unmaintainable? Check out the challenge and the solution to figure that out.

How to test APIs with Gherkin? #GivenWhenThenWithStyle (solution) (Gaspar Nagy, @gasparnagy)

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[BDD] Make your scenarios simpler

When we defined the BRIEF principles in our Formulation book, we included briefness as well among the principles for good BDD scenarios. Having a scenario brief and simple helps the stakeholders to give feedback, the developers to understand the expectation and it helps anyone who needs to understand the test later. Ali Fuat Ateş has collected the most commonly used Gherkin patterns that can make the scenarios simpler.

Simplify Cucumber Steps (Ali Fuat Ateş, linkedin:alifuat-ates)

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[Testing] You don’t have to be born with a testing mindset

I started my software development career at a time where we developers did not care much about testing. We had no testing courses at the university and we did not have to “bother” with testing in my first jobs. Things have been changing fortunately and I am fascinated by all the things I have learned about testing and wondered how I could have learned all these things without the “testing mindset” in my blood. I have come to the conclusion that testing mindset is not something that you are born with. You can develop it! Alan Page has written a great article about this.

The Testing Mindset Myth (Alan Page, @alanpage)

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[BDD] BDD in the testing quadrants

The concept of testing quadrants was introduced by Brian Marick but many of us have learned about it from the Agile Testing books by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. The testing quadrants are a great tool to understand the concept of the early feedback and the power of testing diversity. If you have ever tried to put your tests into the quadrants, you have probably realized that this is not only about labeling the test with Q1 or Q2 but there are transitions between these categories and there are tests that might even belong to more of them. The testing quadrants are a thinking tool, so this is perfectly fine. In his article, Ken Pugh provides an overview of the different tests in the quadrants and how do they support BDD tests.

BDD and The Testing Matrix (Ken Pugh, @kpugh)

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[Cucumber] Share your Cucumber reports

There is a Cucumber implementation for all platforms nowadays. It is not uncommon that one project uses multiple cucumber implementations for testing different parts of the application (e.g. Cucumber.js for the frontend and Cucumber Java for the backend). All these platforms have their own test execution platforms and reporting tools but having a platform-independent reporting solution was something we had missed for a long time. A couple of years ago Cucumber started to introduce a standard output reporting for the test execution, called Cucumber messages and by now, the first reporting solutions that are built on top of the Cucumber messages have been created. The SmartBear Cucumber team works on a hosted reporting solution that uses the new infrastructure and therefore compatible with the different Cucumber implementations. The tool is still in a preview phase, but it can be already used to see the benefits of a shared reporting solution. Have a look at the summary and the demo provided by Seb Rose and try out Cucumber reports yourself at https://reports.cucumber.io/.

Cucumber Reports (SmartBear Cucumber Team, @cucumberbdd)