Getting into the BDD rhythm

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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,…

How can I reuse my gherkin scenarios?

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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,…

BDD Discovery Pitfalls – When the gherkins hide the garden

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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…

BDD and the four pillars of business agility

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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…

Testing REST APIs with Cucumber, Rest Assured and Serenity BDD – a tutorial

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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…

Working with REST APIs using Serenity Screenplay

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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…

What is Behaviour Driven Development? The executive summary

Posted by John Ferguson Smart
bdd | Requirements Discovery | test automation |

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…

Embedding Custom Data in Serenity Reports

Posted by John Ferguson Smart
Living documentation | reporting | serenity-bdd |

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…

BDD Treaties

Posted by John Ferguson Smart
bdd | cucumber | Xscale |

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…

Can you use BDD for legacy applications? Sure you can!

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

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…

© 2019 John Ferguson Smart