John's latest articles
REST API testing an increasingly important part of modern software architectures. And in a world where speedy delivery is of the essence, comprehensive automated tests are not an option. From a testing perspective, understanding REST APIs and how to use them is vital, even if you aren’t writing tests for an API directly. Testers can…
Serenity BDD is a library that helps you write better automated acceptance criteria, and produce better living documentation and executable specifications. In this article, we will look at the key new features in Serenity BDD 2.0. Introduction Serenity BDD is a test automation and reporting library that is used in conjunction with other testing libraries…
For many teams, the benefits of Behaviour Driven Development are obvious. Teams that practice BDD well see significantly lower defect rates and higher quality features. More importantly, they stand a much higher chance of delivering the solutions the customer actually needs. The benefits of BDD are obvious. But then so are the benefits of exercise,…
A Serenity user recently wrote to me with the following question: Is there anyway way to reuse Scenarios? Imagine that I’ve created a feature called “WelcomePage” with a Scenario called “Login” with the steps to Login to some webapp. Now, in a different feature file, on the Background part, use like a WelcomePage.Login (Feature.Scenario) and,…
In this article, we will take a look at a real-world example of BDD scenario refactoring. Sue’s team had just received a new story to work on. Sue’s team works in an international bank, in the regulatory department: they are building a workflow application that makes it easier for auditors to review risky or suspicious…
People often ask where Behaviour Driven Development, or BDD, fits with regards to other agile practices. Managers might say “BDD sounds great. But how do we align our agile transformation strategy with BDD adoption?”. Some ask “Does BDD work with Scrum/SAFe/Kanban/<insert your favourite agile methodology here>”? Some folk even simply ask “So are we doing…
Nowadays, applications rely more and more on well designed, well documented and well tested APIs, and the number of these APIs is steadily increasing. Simply writing test scripts for our REST end points is no longer enough – our APIs need not just tests, but living documentation. The Screenplay pattern is a powerful way of…
An extract from The Serenity Book The Screenplay pattern is an approach to writing automated acceptance tests that helps us write cleaner, more maintainable, more scalable automation code. A Screenplay test talks first and foremost about the tasks a user performs, in business language, rather than diving into the details about buttons, clicks and input…
Behaviour Driven Development (or BDD) is a powerful collaborative methodology that helps teams focus on delivering high value features sooner and more reliably. BDD builds on and extends standard agile practices such as sprint planning and backlog grooming, user stories and acceptance criteria, and makes them much more effective. Teams practicing Behaviour Driven Development routinely…
Executable specification written in Gherkin are a great way both to document an application’s behaviour, and to demonstrate that it works. QA folk can use the generated living documentation to verify both that the feature does what the business expects of it, and that the feature actually works. Because of this, BDD living documentation plays…