Dear BDD Addicts,

The best thing in work this month? Definitely the Living Documentation Event (LDE24), it was a conference in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Living documentation is a key element in BDD and actually I have to say that this conference has been a true BDD conference that I have really missed since BDDx and CukenFest was not organized. 100 people, friendly atmosphere, good talks, pizza, beer, old and new friends… It was really nice. I was invited by the organizer team to do the closing keynote about the SpecFlow – Reqnroll change and the role of living documentation in that: the first time I talked about Reqnroll at a public event.

What can I say? Thanks a lot for Kaspar van Dam, the whole organizer team for the event and fellow BDD addicts, let’s stay tuned for the news about LDE25, planned for 10th April 2025 (there is a newsletter subscription at the bottom of the event recap page)!

But now, out your monthly dose…

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[BDD] The “truth” is BDD

BDD does not work for all. But the funny thing is that in most of those posts explaining why BDD is useless, people describe something that is indeed useless, but not BDD anyway, just have some Given, When, Then inside.

The article by Nikolay Advolodkin is a bit different, but the title is not a good start. Knowing the “truth” about BDD? Come on! But the article itself describes an interesting challenge: What to do when you don’t really know what you can do yet? The problems that can be addressed the best with prototyping. But how can you do a BDD scenario in these cases?

I also face this problem pretty often when working on SpecSync. But I think in the most of the cases this is not about the “kind of” the project you are working on, but just the “phase” of the project is like that. When I need prototyping, I either suspend the BDD-mode working or (and this is more common lately) I create a happy-path prototype scenario and play with the code and the scenario at the same time – they change and improve together and this way I am not only able to figure out what I want, but also how I can express and test it.

But the approach Nikolay is describing is also interesting. Especially as he finally says, his “approach keeps the spirit of BDD”, so at the end it is BDD too. Is that the truth?

The Truth About BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) (Nikolay Advolodkin)

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[Open-Source] You can be one of them

I felt really proud that quickly after its launch, people started to contribute to Reqnroll. Some fixed typos, some reported issues, other started to dig into the code. This has over-exceeded my expectations, especially in our “individualist” world.

It was really nice to stumble across the post of an old SpecFlow contributor, who shared his impressions about what it feels like contributing to an open-source project. Thanks, Marcus!

A small open-source story (Marcus Hammarberg)

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[Test Automation] Is that still a pyramid?

If you have subscribed to the newsletter earlier, you might know that I am really interested in the Testing Pyramid model and have shared and talked about the challenges of “using” it quite a lot of times.

The pyramid was introduced by Mike Cohn in 2009 and he explains why the topmost level should be small, because UI tests are costly and brittle. I was always wondering… what if they would not be costly and brittle?

This is also one of the key questions of Maria Homann. Whether you agree with her… let’s figure it out.

The Testing Pyramid (Maria Homann)

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[Agile Testing] Trusting your instincts

I had a talk on a meetup once, later in the break someone came to me and thanked that I emphasized the importance of the unique “smart” solutions in testing and that one has to trust one’s instincts to find these. He said that it was his fundamental principle of testing, but he is often left alone with that.

Learning different techniques and methods, or applying well-known formulas is important. But you must be behind them. This is what Andy Knight (alias AutomationPanda) reminded me of in his post.

Test coverage and trusting your instincts (Andrew Knight)

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[Testing] The testing show

I don’t count myself as a podcast-person. I don’t travel much and therefore I rarely find time for just listening to podcasts. But in the last month I did listen to a few and was also invited to a new Hungarian quality podcast initiative.

And a couple of days after, I found that there is another testing podcast that has just started: The Vernon Richard Show. It is run by Vernon Richards & Richard Bradshaw – and now you understand the name. They are experienced testers and the informal discussions they have about testing is pretty interesting. Make sure you find them on the major podcast platforms or on YouTube. (Hurry up, the second episode is also online already.)

Smoke Testing, Knowledge Work and Testing in Production (Vernon Richards & Richard Bradshaw)