One may have already noticed that a new wave of Agility is being defined by DevOps, a process that is destined to break down silos within the development, test, and deployment groups. This trend is fast becoming a new norm within the IT organizations of Enterprises that are seriously looking to be Agile. DevOps process, which is re-defining the old way of working, is a highly automated SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) process with many moving parts. Today, if one wants to try and implement DevOps there are many choices of Open-source tools that can be integrated to make the chain of moving parts work smoothly. The adoption will impact the testing community and it is worthwhile for the leaders to start looking into this seriously.
What is BDD in software testing?
Most visible today is that organizations are adopting Behavior Driven Development (BDD) process, a variation of Test-Driven Development (TDD) process. Putting this in simple terms, this user centric process believes that the user behavior is central to software development. The Behavior or “tests for behavior” are defined even before web application development is taken up. Also, testing & UAT of such applications begins with test cases being written as soon as user stories become available. Being an agile process Business Analysts write the UAT test cases.
Now, these intuitively written Behavior Driven Tests are in plain English. The team can use Gherkin scripts to write simple test steps, whereas Test Automation Engineers, using Ruby or JS will complete the executable step definitions and integration. By using Selenium-cucumber, these automation scripts are executed to test web application running on browsers. Testers work collaboratively and by using testing methodologies can make test repository comprehensive. Also, Selenium grid can be used to run test scripts simultaneously on multiple browsers to achieve higher efficiency by reducing the execution time. Further, automated test solution can be integrated with Jenkins CI build environment to achieve “Continuous Delivery.” Most importantly, testers can bring in solution in providing comprehensive test reports that are important for the acceptance of the build and deployment of software into production.
Enterprises are beginning to recognize this as a stable, intuitive, user-friendly environment that automates and accelerate testing and UAT. Organizations like Amazon, Google are now able to make mind blowing numbers of deployments per hour and reap the benefits of being “True blue Agile Enterprises.” The rigorous pace at which these organization are growing is a testament for the effectiveness of this integrated process.
The implementation of this BDD/TDD Test framework demands an ever-increasing maturity from Dev and QA leaders of enterprises as well as the vendor organizations. Having said this, we are seeing a steady movement towards adopting this framework as more consulting companies are bringing in innovative solutions across the DevOps & Testing value chain.
Keen to know if you have had experience examining this approach and framework? Is Agile BDD testing pace good enough for you?
To know more about how to implement BDD framework, how it speeds up your testing processes or if you are implementing BDD testing framework/BDD approach in agile and need help, please feel free to contact us at info@nousinfo.com Looking forward to your comments and answering your questions.
