Uplifted our development practices and culture

I've had the pleasure of working with John as a repeat customer for almost a decade. During this time John has helped to educate and mentor our staff to become better cross functional delivery teams. John’s technical and coaching skills are highly developed. In addition, he is a thought leader and expert who has a deep and thorough knowledge of BDD, Agile development, software development, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, programming languages and build and test tools. I have not come across anyone in the world who has such a high level of expertise across so many technologies and practices.

The results were amazing

Recently as part of Transport for New South Wales's Open Data project, where application developers can obtain multi modal journey trip planning data for presentation on mobile device applications such as Opal Travel, one of the teams that John trained was assigned a project that had taken previous teams within the organisation years with no results. We had never applied BDD to a data centric project before and the results were amazing. They were able to deliver the project in four months. They released with no defects and a living specification that describes the behaviour of the data integration in simple business terms.

Increased productivity and improved testing cycle time

With John's help, adopting BDD and Serenity framework has increased productivity and improved testing cycle time by approximately 20%.

Already proven highly valuable

John was instrumental in introducing BDD into Transport for New South Wales, and the results were astounding. We have just finished a data integration project, using SAP BI tools, which drives a major part of the bus realtime phone apps and in the few months, will drive all bus timetables through 131500 trip planner.

Thanks to our BDD practices, we can run full regression tests in 6 minutes, which is incredible! The best bit is the communications afforded by the "living documentation" we are now providing to the business.

This was an ongoing struggle last year

One area my teams have struggled with is writing their BDD G/W/T .feature files at the right level. Because we work on medical devices, many engineers were writing their BDD at a really low implementation detail level.

Writin g BDD in this “imperative steps” style is an anti-pattern and goes against the whole purpose of creating scenarios in the “as a user,” So I was coaching them to create their G/W/T at a more abstract-level, non implementation — like using a more declarative approach.

Decorate as per requirements of the family

"The Serenity BDD ( Thucydides ) framework is like a Christmas tree. Once you have it three quarters of task is done: later one needs to just decorate as per requirements of the family :)..."

It’s the testing solution of our choice

One of my first tasks in my role was to come up with an automated testing solution for our web and mobile e-banking solution. I conducted a vast research through open source frameworks as well as proprietary solutions, worth mentioning Vaading Testbench, eggPlant, Ranorex, TestComplete, etc. I was very lucky when a good friend responsible for QA at Adobe dragged my attention to Serenity, formerly known as Thucydides.