Is the Juice of BDD Testing Worth the Squeeze?

Have you ever felt like a pretzel while contorting a test case into a "Given-When-Then" scenario? The promise of BDD as a method for simplifying the communication and construction of a robust set of test cases has been somewhat successful in facilitating conversation but has impeded the take-up of more sophisticated analysis techniques, including depth of understanding, non-functional requirements, UI coverage reporting, and fundamental ease of adoption. In short a tool for communication not a tool for thinking! Application teams, especially those configuring or customizing SaaS or PaaS solutions, need a Swiss army knife of communication tools and visuals to reason about, work through, and refine test plans, scenarios, and outputs to align expectations. In this session, Patrick Grant will cover some additional approaches that have been successful at MCANTA. He will demonstrate how a tester can use a combination of application performance monitoring tools and UI graphing techniques mapped to test cases to reach a shared understanding of testing progress. This visual representation facilitates a data-driven conversation on application readiness for deployment. This approach expands on research from Prof Sylvain Hallé ("Test Suite Generation") at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi as well as topics covered in ISTQB courses.