Our own Laurent Py, co-founder of HipTest, joined Joe Colantonio of TestTalks last week to discuss the benefits of Behavior Driven Development (BDD).
It was the 232nd edition of the TestTalks podcast, on which Colantonio has interviewed hundreds of experts in the field of software test automation over the past five years. Laurent had previously joined the podcast back in August 2016 to talk about how HipTest supports Agile test management.
In the latest episode, Laurent discussed the need for business, development, and QA stakeholders to collaborate early on. He emphasized the importance “having the conversation [about benefits] upfront, before starting a penny into development.” The goal, he said, is to “create a shared understanding and have a clear definition of what the feature should do [before starting development].”
The fruits of taking the time to collaborate upfront are plentiful, said Laurent: “Having the conversation and creating this shared understanding [is] definitely the biggest outcome of BDD.”
HipTest makes it easy to get started with BDD. Team members can create action words using the Gherkin syntax to define example scenarios in a common language that all stakeholders (regardless of technical skillset) can easily understand. These action words can be used across different scenarios – thus establishing a single point of maintenance and simultaneously ensuring that consistent business terminology is being used.
Once those scenarios have been created, HipTest generates executable scripts for more than 20 frameworks (like Cucumber, JBehave, SpecFlow, and more) to make automation easy. Tracking the results of those automated or manual tests is also simplified, thanks to a native integration with Jira.
The last piece comes in the form of living documentation. The beauty of this feature (currently in beta), Laurent says, is that “You are sure that what you read in the documentation reflects the true behavior, the actual behavior, of the application in production.”
As HipTest continues to evolve, we hope you’ll take advantage of exciting new features like living documentation. You can try the Pro version of the tool free for 30 days – after that, the free version is available for teams of three users or fewer.
Click here to try HipTest now.