John's latest articles
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…
Better cross-team coordination with collaborative governance and executable specifications Getting multiple teams to work together effectively on large projects can be tricky. We expect teams to be autonomous and independent. But at the same time we expect them to coordinate with other equally autonomous and independent teams, so that their modules or services mesh seamlessly…
A few folk have been asking me about how BDD works with legacy applications. So here are my thoughts. BDD is a collaboration process that involves multiple team members working together with BAs, business or product owners to discover and refine requirements using structured conversations about examples of user and system behaviour. It is an…
In the latest InfoQ Engineering Culture and Methods Report, for the first time, the essential agile practices of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), Craftsmanship and Coaching/Mentoring appear in the Early Majority category. It is not to soon. High performing organisations and teams have long realised that Scrum alone is not enough. One survey actually found that…
“In a team practicing BDD, who owns the Gherkin scenarios?” I’ve been asked this question more than once, so I thought I’d pen an answer. Gherkin is the Given..When..Then notation commonly used to express acceptance criteria in agile projects. It is notably used by Cucumber and other related Behaviour Driven Development tools. Cucumber lets you…
Remember when the iPhone came out? Remember how Steve Jobs pitched that it “Changed Everything”, the first time? Maybe he was exaggerating a little, but there is no doubt that the iPhone was a game-changer. It changed the way we thought about what a telephone should do. The iPhone was what we call a market…
What is Living documentation Living Documentation comes from the world of Behaviour Driven Development, and is closely related to the idea of Executable Specifications. But what do we mean by “living documentation”? Living documentation is, as the name suggests, both documentation, and living. It is documentation. It describes how an application works, and what business rules affect…
AngularJS applications have their own challenges when it comes to WebDriver test automation. The asycnhronous nature of Angular apps makes testing these applications particularly tricky when using traditional WebDriver-based technologies. In the JavaScript world, Protractor provides an elegant solution to the problem of testing AngularJS apps. Protractor supports angular-specific locators and knows how to wait…