Functional Testing and Automation within Behavior Driven Development Chris Kozak, ThoughtWorks
About the Topic
Many quality issues stem from poor communication between a project's various stakeholders. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) attempts to address this problem by clarifying desired software behavior through discussion between stakeholders - the BA who thinks about the business' objectives, the QA who thinks about the edge cases, and the Developer who thinks about the implementation. The outputs of these discussions are specifications, which describe a system's requirements in high-level natural language. These specifications are used by the developer to guide their implementation. After a given feature has been implemented, the developer and tester sit down and automate the specification as a regression test which continues to exist after the software is delivered as "living documentation." These automated tests are not the same as a test script. Since they are written in a non-technical way, test failures are understood by both technical and non-technical stakeholders and defect triage is simplified. JBehave and Selenium/WebDriver will be used to demonstrate these automated tests within Behavior Driven Development
About the Speaker
Chris Kozak is a Technical Lead at ThoughtWorks where he straddles the space between Software Development and Quality Assurance. He thinks that the software world should have more overlap of these two roles. He has experience in a number of industries ranging from automotive to retail, mobile to airlines. He is a passionate problem solver and a strong proponent of the behavior-driven approach to software development. He is also an occasional contributor to the JBehave project. In his spare time he tries to hunt down some adventure. This, at various times, has led to his cycling from San Francisco to Washington DC, backpacking in Nepal, skydiving, hiking the Canadian Rockies, and canoeing the Boundary Waters
