TestFlix 2021 – John Ferguson Smart

Atomic Talk Title: BDD: NOT The Given-When-Then Thing

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) might just be the most misunderstood practice in agile testing, and agile in general.

Done well, it’s a powerful, highly effective collaboration practice that has helped many many teams deliver better software faster and with fewer defects.

But it is often confused with test automation, mistaken for a specific toolset (Cucumber) or a specific format (Given..When..Then).

In fact it is none of these things. And ignorance is NOT bliss. What you don’t know CAN hurt you. Misunderstanding what BDD is, and how it works, can lead to wasted time and effort, and hard-to-maintain test scripts.

So in this short talk, we look at what BDD isn’t, and more importantly, what BDD is.

Takeaways:

1. Benefits of BDD
   
2. Common misunderstandings about BDD
   
3. BDD anti-patterns
   
4. How BDD is supposed to work

Speaker Bio

John helps testers become brilliant agile test automation engineers.

Over the years he has helped hundreds of testers get into, and become very good at, test automation. As a result he knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t.

He has been helping teams deliver software better for over two decades. But a few years back he had to train a group of testers in BDD and Test Automation. They were mostly new to test automation, but the company needed quality automated testers, and they needed them yesterday! So he came up with a tailored programme to get them there, fast.

And it worked: six months later, they were automating business scenarios 4-5 times faster than colleagues who had not been on the programme.

Just message him or just copy the following link in your browser to book a call:

https://bit.ly/serenity-dojo-clarity-call