197: Discovery Explore Behavior Using Examples with Gaspar Nagy

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• BDD does not replace classic testing and testing skills. In fact, BDD itself does not define how testing should be performed. Instead, it provides a set of practical guidelines that facilitate the agile testing process.
• BDD is an agile approach that consists of three practices that have to be addressed in order. The first practice is discovery, a structured, collaborative activity that uses concrete examples to uncover the ambiguities and misunderstandings that traditionally derail software projects. The second practice is formulation, a creative process that turns the concrete examples produced during discovery into business-readable scenarios. The subsequent review of the scenarios delivers the confidence that the team really has understood what the business is asking for. The third, and final, practice is automation where the code is written that turns the scenarios into tests.
• Developing software is a process of learning. I’ve never met a team that, after they deliver some working software, say “if we were to do that again, we’d do it exactly the same way.” That’s because, in the course of developing the software, they discover things that they didn’t know at the beginning.
• You might have seen the term Specification by Example and assumed that this meant examples were sufficient to specify software. The intent, however, is to emphasize the use of examples to support a specification by making it harder for the rules to be misinterpreted.
• Without the business involved in BDD, unless the team is very business-focused and disciplined, the scenarios become technical, data-driven and dry. This means that the business get very little value from reading the scenarios and, consequently, won’t understand the implication of a failing scenario. This removes the possibility that
  the scenarios will provide a constructive feedback loop between the business and delivery team – so the scenarios become an overhead.
• BDD depends on collaboration!

Resources

• Buy Discovery Explore Behavior Using BDD Examples

Connect with Gáspár Nagy

• Twitter: @gasparnagy
• Blog: gasparnagy.com
• YouTube: Spec Solutions
• LinkedIn: gasparnagy
• Company: Specsolutions

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