[Cucumber] Executable specifications are the holy grail for iterative delivery of siftware

[Tim Walker]

Dudes and dudettes,

It was before the agile manifesto and after 20 years of software engineering that my friend uttered the words I used for the subject of this text. Now, 20 years later, I am more convinced than ever. 

Initially it was FIT and FitNesse. And then JBehave and RBehave, Story Runner, Rspec and Now Cucumber and a host of other tools supporting Gherkin.

Often misunderstood as a testing framework or something we use solely as developers (BDD) we struggle to communicate to others what it is and the incredible power it brings to our Agile initiatives.

It was 2008 that I met Gojko Adzic in Toronto. Gojko, with his brilliant Bridging the Communication Gap, and Specification by Example, had been writing about FIT for .Net and encountering these challenges.

It was later that I worked with Matt Wynne (The Cucumber Book and core contributor) to establish a RelishApp server at a very large federal government to publish our cukes as the true single source of truth in living documentation backed by test automation.

I have used BDD and key related practices (Domain Driven, User Story Mapping) to establish infrastructure in the cloud, to verify massively distributed devices on our electric grid, and verifying image satellite systems. 

I see colleagues like Lynn Winterbore taking this to and revolutionizing Big Data.

Executable Requirements are the holy grail of iterative development. You can try traditional requirements approaches and QA practices for Agile if you want. Let me know how it works out for you.

[Tim Walker]

I just pressed send on this and began reading the chapter "False Quality Gates" in the book "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies". Amazing and direct corollary to the spirit of this thread. Take a look.

[Koen Prins]

Thanks for the book recommendation, shame it is hard to get locally.

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[80Vikram]

Thanks for this email and books recommendation.

I still wonder why BDD is not so popular in IT industry. People simply don't want to follow.

For it's like "I know it's good to brush teeth before going to bed, but I'm too lazy to do that".

Majority of engineers + managers simply love doing "You Burn, I Scrape"

Regards,
Vikram