BDD and Calliope Pro
I was in a conversation a few days ago with a party that wanted to know the relationship between our test case feature files and the work the business analysts were doing. This was a very good question because the work of a software testing team should not be done in a vacuum, meaning, the team should always be aware of the upstream business people to whom their work is relevant.
For those of you not familiar with BDD feature files, don’t worry, I’m going in that direction in the next part of this post.
What is BDD?
BDD is a very mature methodology that has many processes, procedures and tools to help teams of all sizes. It is perfectly integrated with AGILE software development and the SCRUM method of running teams.
A concise explanation of BDD from Wikipedia is:
- “Behaviour-driven development (BDD) is an agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, quality assurance testers, and customer representatives in a software project,” according to Wikipedia’s entry on the matter. BDD promotes the use of concrete examples and conversations amongst the team members to document a shared understanding of how the application should behave.
There are several good books on this subject:
- BDD in Action – This shows the practical implementation for commercial software projects. There is a second edition of this book coming in Q1 2022, so watch out for it.
- BDD and Acceptance Tests – This shows a practical implementation of how business stakeholders and software stakeholders can work to produce acceptance tests for validating a software system.
How BDD and Calliope Pro are related
Now the connection between BDD and Calliope Pro is this; Cucumber BDD is a software stack that is a tool that starts with BDD software requirements (or specifications) produced by both the business and software people and converts the software features in the specs to working automated tests.
A feature file specification is written in Gherkin syntax. These are the formalised GIVEN-WHEN-THEN statements that represent the PRECONDITION-ACTION-VERIFICATION of a software component. The Cucumber software stack is a sophisticated system that accepts feature files in Gherkin syntax and allows you to build equally sophisticated software tests.
The output from the software tests is the starting data set input for Calliope Pro, which we transform into the graphical dashboards that are the heart of how we represent information.
BDD – Cucumber – Gherkin – SCRUM all work together to give you an end-to-end process, starting with the business stakeholders and ending with high quality delivered software to your production environment that has met all of the time, money, scope and requirements conditions.
The foundation of Calliope Pro is the BDD – Cucumber – Gherkin – SCRUM business and software stack. None of them is separate, they are all the essential components that together have made Calliope Pro.
Finishing up
I hope that has given you an idea of how Calliope Pro supports your business by having BDD methodology as its foundation. I would enjoy hearing about people’s experiences with BDD, Cucumber and Agile, so feel free to reach out via Slack and have a discussion with us.
