A day (or a sprint) in the life of a BDD team

Posted by John Ferguson Smart
Agile | bdd | business analysis | testing |

Introduction Behaviour Driven Development is a collaboration practice that uses conversations around concrete examples and requirements, expressed in an executable form, to deliver higher value software more effectively. In this article, we walk through a typical BDD process. While every BDD team is different, and mature teams adapt and refine their process to suit their…

Serenity BDD Tip: fine-tuning screenshots in your living documentation

Posted by John Ferguson Smart
bdd | junit | serenity | testing |

One of the distinguishing features of Serenity BDD is its powerful reporting capabilities. If you organise and structure your tests well, Serenity can help you turn your tests into a sort of light-weight functional documentation, describing both what your application does in high level terms, and how users use the application to achieve specific goals….

The role of QA in a DevOps world

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

If you believe what you hear, DevOps is the latest “big thing”. According to a recent survey, high performance teams practicing a DevOps culture deploy 30 times faster and have 60 times fewer failures than low performing teams. Companies having adopted DevOps have been reported reducing the average time it takes to get a feature…

I don’t ask devs to commit, and neither should you

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

I’ve seen the ‘C’ word floating around the Agile blogosphere again recently – yes, “Commit”. And I’m not talking about Git. I’m talking about that stick that incompetent scrum-masters use to beat their team members into submission so they can look good in the eyes of their managers. You see, “commitment” to delivery individual stories…

The five stages of BDD (and Agile) Adoption

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

An article by John Ferguson Smart and Jan Molak. More and more organisations are looking to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) and related practices, as a way to gain or maintain their competitive advantage in software delivery. This is generally a good thing, and the teams I see that succeed in embracing a BDD and Agile…

The Project Management Triangle must die!

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

By John Ferguson Smart and Jan Molak “On time, in scope and in budget”. This is the refrain of countless project managers on their LinkedIn profiles: it is the badge of the successful project manager, and they wear it with pride. It is also a misguided and dangerous idea that invariably encourages a short-sighted and…

Beyond the 10,000 hour myth – how we really acquire skill

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

As the old saying goes, “Practice makes perfect”. Indeed, a well-established piece of lore, popularly known as “The 10,000 hour rule”, states that to be an expert in any domain, you need to have practiced it for at least 10,000 hours. This rule was coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers” in 2008. According…

Better Automated Acceptance Tests With Serenity Screenplay

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

The Screenplay Pattern is a powerful and elegant approach to designing and implementing automated tests, providing a number of improvements over more traditional approaches such as the Page Objects model. Automated tests written using Serenity are faster to write, easier to read and easier to maintain then more conventional approaches. On one recent project, using…

What are your automated tests really worth?

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

An article by John Ferguson Smart with Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer Only the blissfully ignorant or the insanely confident would forgo automated testing in a modern development project. But automated tests have a cost, in terms both of development and maintenance. In this article, we take a look at the economics of automated tests,…

The Three Pillars of Trustworthy Test Automation

Posted by John Ferguson Smart

An article by John Ferguson Smart, Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer Few will deny the importance of Automated Acceptance Testing in modern software development. A high quality set of automated acceptance tests helps you deliver valuable features sooner by reducing the wasted time spent in manual testing and fixing bugs. When combined with Behaviour Driven…

© 2019 John Ferguson Smart