We have been using waterfall to develop and enhance the system in our company and recently we are moving into Agile and the management is interested in BDD.
My understanding is that BDD is a tool for business and development team to refine the stories and at the same time these scenarios will become test cases for the feature. This sounds perfect to me but since we already have the features available, how can BDD work in this type of situation?
Should we just write up the stories and scenarios per our knowledge of the feature?
My only concern of the above is the coverage of the scenarios. Or we shouldn't worry and keep adding new scenarios and test it whenever the team came up with new ones?
Prompted by yet another person who mailed me with the same question today, I've written up an answer for this.
Short version, you can use BDD to help you understand what the system actually does, and why, but you'll be clarifying the requirements rather than exploring them.
Additionally, you asked, "Should we just write up the stories and scenarios per our knowledge of the feature?"
I'd speak with any stakeholders you can find, ask them what the system should do, then look to see if it actually does it. Systems designed before adopting a practice of conversations with examples often don't do what the originators intended. You can then differentiate between the behaviour you've actually got, while creating a new backlog from the behaviour you want.
I advise grabbing someone who's good at asking questions and spotting missing scenarios to have these discussions with (usually a tester). Because you already have some knowledge of the system, it's likely you'll be very good at describing what you think it does, while missing gaps.
If you don't have any automated testing yet and you want to start using BDD, I would suggest you to start by writing some Scenarios for some of your manual tests scripts, I find it to be a good way to train the writing of the BDD style, then as Lunivore said, you should work together with the business people and QA to find out better about the behaviour of your system and preferably write the scenarios with them.
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I am currently working for a large organisation with about 2k developers working in our IT department. We maintain many things including our e-commerce platform and there are currently about 30 projects currently impacting that.
Recently all of our teams have been instructed to deliver a series of automated tests using Concordion and Selenium Webdriver. For a while this has been going fairly well and many tests have been created but lately maintaining the existing tests while our e-commerce platform constantly changes has been somewhat of a nightmare. We have thousands of test scripts covering many parts of our website but there does not seem to be any facility in Concordion to split scripts into reusable compartments which could then be maintained once, rather than having to make changes to hundreds of HTML files for one change.
How are other people approaching this?
The goal of Concordion is not to implement test scripts as HTML, but rather for the HTML to describe the behaviour that you are testing (what you are trying to achieve). The implementation details (how it is being tested) are implemented as Java code. This code can then be structured with an appropriate level of abstraction so that each change to the system under test only requires a change to one part of the code.
Your HTML specifications should only need to change on the rare occasions that the business rules change.
These concepts are described further on the Hints and Tips tab of the Concordion home page.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. It’s great to hear / read about large scale application of behavior driven development / specification by example.
One approach that could help you is to focus on key examples (http://gojko.net/2014/05/05/focus-on-key-examples). During specification workshops the entire team is working to get a common understanding of the new user needs and requirements. Then you go on and write specification documents containing key examples. There you should not try to cover everything, but to write only as many examples as necessary to express the common understanding.
Additionally, you should try to identify concepts, on which the examples are based. Are there some examples related to a similar topic – this is probably an underlying concept. It is often easier to understand the examples, if they focus just on one concept (e.g. the validation of a card number). Each concept can be usually described with only a few examples.
Do you have any other types of automated tests (e.g. unit tests)? Are you experiencing the same maintainability challenges with these other tests? Could you use good practices from these other test types to improve your Concordion approach?
Could you tell us more about your setup? How many active specifications have you already created within your company?
I am unsure about the goals of BDD after reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior-driven_development.
Which of the following are goals of Behavior-Driven Design (BDD)? Select all that apply.
To verify that the application meets the specification
To validate that the design does what the customer wants
To help the customer understand the use of the application
To ask questions about the behavior of an application before and during development
I selected (1), (2), (3), and (4) on the quiz since all seemed to be goals of BDD, but I got the question wrong. Which of these are not goals of BDD?
Helping the customer understand the use of the application is not one of the goals of BDD.
The goal of BDD is "software that matters". That's been the tag line since Dan North started talking about it back in 2004. It's one of the reasons why it's changed a little bit since its inception, and now includes things like Feature Injection; because every time we find a place where we can use BDD and still write software that doesn't matter, we fix BDD.
All four elements you've listed here are things that people commonly do as part of BDD (and yes, I've seen people use it to help the customer understand what they really want and how to use something a bit differently), with the aim of writing software that matters, though IMO if you're using BDD to verify or validate something, you're probably already too late.
In the light of BDD, would it be a good idea to use Cucumber features and scenarios to write up the functional requirements document at the start of a new Rails project?
Probably not. This would be a case of BDUF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Design_Up_Front).
It's unlikely you'll be able to think of all the scenarios up front. You should split the high-level requirements into features to help estimate and prioritise them, but leave the detailed scenario writing to just before you're ready to begin implementing each feature.
If you are not the one making all the decisions and someone thinks you need these,
then it might appear to be a better choice than MS word.
I actually joined a project with a million un-implemented features,
so we had loads of integrations test in theory, just none
of them were actually implemented.
Its months later and we still have some,
its really difficult working in an environent where
everything is failing at once.
Its better to have 1 failing step at a time.
I also think feautures should be written by application developers who
understand user flow realities.
I like the business or client to explain stuff to me in a conversational syle,
a bit at a time, not their entire vision for world domination in 10 000 words,
I will keep that for bed time.
I'd like to enable the business analysts to be able to write all of their specs for features, scenarios and steps that is Cucumber friendly using Gherkin.
I've read some of the basic info on the github site for Cucumber and from doing a quick Google search but wanted to know if there were recommended resources for getting non-technical folks to be able to write comprehensive BDD using Gherkin (I assume that's the preferred language for Cucumber tests to be created in).
Thanks.
What I did with the business analysts in our company was to teach them the structure by giving them the keywords: Given, When, Then, And for Scenarios and In order to, As a and I want to for Features.
Then I gave them a simple example and told them to write down their own features as they thought they should be written. Surprisingly enough the structure was self explanatory and the features they wrote became a great start.
The only big problem was that they had contained to much logic in each scenario step. I solved that by iteratively asking "why?" which in most cases revealed the core functionality they were after and we re-wrote the scenarios accordantly.
By giving them the guidelines and letting them write the features themselves they got their hands dirty and were forced to think about what they wrote. Today they have a much better understanding and the "why?" iterations are not that common anymore.
Ofcourse you need to have the business analysts and the developers to work closely together and the features the analysts write should only act as a start. Remember that the Cucumber features are just a common language between the analysts and the developers. They still need to sit together often to be able to speak with each other :)
http://cukes.info is a great resource for teaching people how to write them. Ben Mabey also made a great presentation on Cucumber at Mountain West Ruby Conference 2009.
Having just worked on an agile project using cucumber for the first time I think that the best way to learn Cucumber and Gherkin is to get your hands dirty.
I may be wrong but I get the impression from your question you are wanting to train your BAs to write Gherkin; then they will write a bunch of features and hand them to developers.
This is definitely not the way to go. It is much better to have BA's devs and users (if possible) working together to write your scenarios and build them as you go. Then you all learn together what works and what doesn't.
We tried having a BA write entire features and hand them over. We (the devs) ended up having to do major rewrites because the implementation ended up different to that originally envisioned by the BA. We also had to change the syntax of the steps and do find and replace through the whole file.
Do one scenario at a time, get it working then move on to the next. An iterative approach reduces wasted effort and makes sure you all understand how you want the app to behave.
In terms of how to write steps it is best to start with the ones that come with Cucumber and copy and adapt them as you work on your project to fit your particular application. There is no right or wrong, it is what works for you. The documentation on the cucumber sites is generally good and will be a valuable resource as you learn more.
We are teaching Gherkin (for SpecFlow) in a similar way, how mrD has described it.
I think it is very important though, that the audience is familiar with the main intention of "Specification by Example", agile requirement analysis and BDD, so we usually start discussing the background first. We also show a sample Gherkin scenario and explain the very basics (like Given/When/Then/But and tables).
Than we take a simple example story (that is quite familiar to everyone), like "add items to shopping cart" (with some orientation, of course) and let them formulate the acceptance criteria in small groups.
After that every team shows / explains their solutions and we discuss the good and bad practices that were present. After the second team, you can see almost all of the most important (good or bad) practices appearing.
I also type in the concluded solution, and show here alternative ways of describing the scenarios (background, scenario outline, etc.). If there is enough time, I also show how to automate & implement the imagined functionality based on that. This also help to understand some important rules to follow, that makes the automation much easier.
Although, I never know upfront what will happen, usually this exercise is the best part of our BDD training.
The RSpec book has a couple of chapters in it that are relevant to Business Analysts:
http://pragprog.com/book/achbd/the-rspec-book
I think the best way to learn is to start writing. Gherkin & Cucumber are easy to learn but difficult to master, so it’s important to get to practical examples as soon as possible.
While it’s important to get started by writing your first scenarios, you also need some resources to establish good habits and understand key practices. I wrote a book that could help. “Writing Great Specifications” is, I hope, a good way to learn Gherkin and Cucumber. It covers patterns and antipatterns as well as key techniques for writing great scenarios. :) If you have any questions, you can always hit me up on Twitter.
If you are interested in buying “Writing Great Specifications,” you can save 39% with the promo code 39nicieja2 :)
Other great resources:
“Specification by Example” by Gojko Adzic if you’re interested in software development processes and high-level engineering practices.
“BDD in Action” by John Smart if you don’t mind reading testing code in Java. It’s a comprehensive end-to-end view on defining and testing software requirements.
“Behaviour-Driven Development” by Liz Keogh if automated testing doesn’t ring a bell, but you want to understand how specifications with examples affect your business analysis processes.
“The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers” by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy
“The RSpec Book: Behaviour-Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends” by David Chelimsky, Dave Astels, Zach Dennis, Aslak Hellesøy, Bryan Helmkamp, Dan North
Best way to learn Gherkin is to read the Behat documents first: http://behat.readthedocs.org
Then read official documents from cucumber site: https://cucumber.io/docs/reference
Also, you can read Guru99 article to write your first cucumber script: http://www.guru99.com/your-first-cucumber-script.html
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I work as a lone developer in a very small company. My work is quite chaotic and I'm looking for ways to make it more organized.
One problem is that my projects have practically no management. Rarely anyone asks me what I'm doing, or if I have any problems. At some point there was talk about weekly status meetings, but that's some time ago. Seems that if I'd want something like that, I would have to arrange those myself.. Sometimes I'm a bit lost on what I should do next because I don't have tasks or a clear schedule defined.
From books and articles I have found many things that might be helpful. Like having a good coding standard (there exists only a rough style guide which is somewhat outdated in my opinion), code inspections, TDD, unit testing, bug database... But in a small company it seems there are no resources or time for anything that's not essential. The fact that I work in the embedded domain seems to make things only more complicated.
I feel there's also a custom of cutting corners and doing quick hacks on short notice. This leads to unfinished and unprofessional products and bugs waiting to emerge at a later date. I would imagine they are also a pain to maintain. So, I'm about to inherit a challenging code base, doing new development that requires learning a lot of new things and I guess trying to build a process for it all at the same time. It might be rewarding in the end, but as not too experienced I'm not sure if I can pull it off.
In a small shop like this the environment is far from optimal for programming. There's many other things needed to be done occasionally like customer support, answering the phone, signing parcels, hardware testing, assembly and whatever miscellaneous tasks might appear. So you get the idea about the resources. It's not all bad (sometimes it's enlightening to solve some customer problems) and I believe it can be improved, but it's the other things that I'm really concerned.
Is it possible to have a development process in a place like this?
Would it help to have some sort of management? What kind of?
Is it possible to make quality products with small resources?
How do I convince myself and others that the company which has worked successfully for decades needs to change? What would be essential?
Maybe there's someone working in a similar shop?
Use Source Control for EVERYTHING
Develop specifications and get signoff before starting - there will be resistance, but explain it's for their own good.
Unit tests! It hurts because you just want to get it done, but this will save you in the long run.
Use bug tracking - Bugzilla or FogBugz if you can afford it.
My advice is not to be extreme. From my experience, pure agile or pure traditional will not work. Before you use any process, know what it mean to solve.
I personally use a variation of Agile RUP. I do some upfront effort such as investigate the actual needs, do high-level design with possible extension. And ask customer to sign-off some major high-level requirements.
If you work in small group, detail design or specification may not worth. Of course, if there is some libraries that are shared by many, it will be worth the trouble.
Deciding what to invest in up-front depending on its risk (likelihood and effect).
Moreover, many SW best practice is really 'best' like version control, automatic testing (to me I only used it way to early detect regression as I do not believe in TDD as driven force of the development). I suggest you read 'Pragmatic Programmer' it presents many of those techines.
As to answer you questions:
(1). Is it possible to have a development process in a place like this?
Yes, but as I say, trailer it to fit your organization.
(2). Would it help to have some sort of management? What kind of?
Management helps but no control freak. Plan what to do when: integrate, resolve conflict, dead line of some mile stone. And roughly keep them on schedule (I particularly like Scrum's sprint).
(3). Is it possible to make quality products with small resources?
Definitely as soon as the size of the work, the time to develop and the size of the team is balance. If you definition of Quality is the same with me. To me, Quality means: solve the problem it set out to in an efficient and reliable fashion.
(4). How do I convince myself and others that the company which has worked successfully for decades needs to change? What would be essential?
Point out the problems. If there are none, why change? If you want to change, you should be able to identify the problem OR potential problems. Point out the problem.
Some big one are:
Without any process, it is harder for new recruited to blend in as they must learn from observing other how to deal with things.
Without process, it is harder to work in stress.
Without schedule, it is hard to determine the progress.
Without automatic testing, it will takes more time to identify problems and regression.
Without version control, it will be harder to roll-back mistake and separation of work to each team members will be mess.
Just my though.
You need to work with the owner and setup short medium and long term goals. You will want to let them know progress even if only through email.
You will need to enforce some order on your workday or you will never get anything done (those long term goals).
Divide your day up into chunks when you can code, when you are working on hacks to keep it togther, when answering emails etc.
Definitely setup a bug tracker. This can help keep your email clean. You can even setup an email address to forward bugs to be categorized later. This is good because the bug reporters will eventually tire of the bug tracker and want to just email you the bugs anyway.
edit
And as lod3n said, source control, but you are using that already right???!!?!
Been there, done that.
The book Planning Extreme Programming helped a lot. I used 3x5 cards stuck on a wall. This kept my boss informed of my progress, helped with estimates and planning, and kept me on track. The Planning Game gives good ammo if your boss's expectations are unrealistic.
Unit testing, as others have stated, helps even if you're a sole developer. I find the TDD style valuable.
lod3n is absolutely right about Source Control.
I've gone with XP-style iterations before; you may want to establish a backlog of items (even something simple like a spreadsheet or 3x5 cards) as well.
Avoid deathmarches. Stick to 40 hours in the sense of not working overtime 2 weeks in a row. Spend extra time outside of work learning new skills - not just technologies, but principles and best practices.
Have a bug tracking system, both for defects and new features. Don't rely on your memory.
Continuous integration and an automated build can help even a single developer.
Can't emphasize the recommendation for source control enough.
I've decided I don't need unit tests because I can have automated functional/integration tests instead: because with incremental development there's no need to test before integration.
as crazy as this sounds I use scrum just because I like the concepts of sprints, and backlogs. It makes it easier to set realistic goals. Of course the idea of scrum master and team is all you but if you are working on outside projects where it is possible that you may pick up an extra team member with your backlogs it will be easy to distribute work. Maybe I just like backlogs. With scrum you will need to get someone to be the product manager to talk about the features of the product. Version control is a must at probably should be implemented b4 even worrying about a software development process. I have worked in a company that started from 2 developers and went to 12 in a year. We started with no version control and low coding standards. The changes you will need to make will be gradual so don't worry about rushing to do a 180. Set a goal to change one thing a month and find supporters of your changes to make things go smooth.
As well as the recommedations of others I'd say that if you are tight on resources but have more say over how things get done you should make good use of off the shelf and open source products and libraries. This leverages the efforts of others, saving you time, ensures your code base doesn't become too esoteric and adds to your skillset so you don't end up being an expert in something that's useless everywhere else.
First, lets make a distinction between a development process and best practices. Best practices like source control, defect tracking, unit testing, etc. are an given.
Then there is the actual development processes. I would always recommend having a process, no matter small or large the team is. The trick is finding the right process. You have a process now - it is just an ad-hoc process that doesn't seem to be working out too well for for you. Rarely can you take a textbook development process and directly apply it. What you need to do is tailor the process to your companies needs and culture. Look at as many development paradigms as you can and try to find something that is a good fit and them start molding it to your needs. You may have to try and fail with a number of different processes. Perhaps the Personal Software Process will be a good starting process, maybe an agile process, a variant of RUP? You have a lot of options, start trying them out.
You are also going to have to work with the rest of your organization - they need to be a part of the process. You may be the lone developer, but a development process involves more than the developer, it involves ever person that has a say or impact in the product.
This may not be a specific answer, but my point is that you will need some kind of process. So start researching them and trying them out and molding them to your needs until you have something that works.