Bob Cotton, April 30, 2007

Behavior Driven Development: An Evolution in Testing

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is not a revolution in testing, but an evolution in how developers think about program design. BDD was born from the idea that most developers were not realizing the full potential from Test Driven Development (TDD). Many people have said that TDD is not about testing but about design. However, the language of "testing" impedes the novice from using TDD as a design tool.

The rSpec project is an implementation of BDD in Ruby. Taking advantage of the language's flexibility, rSpec gives the developer a rich language in which to express behavior, from the unit level up to story acceptance. rSpec is a unit testing framework that tries to focus the developer on defining the behavior of classes instead of testing private methods and internal state. rSpec also includes a mock objects framework.

In this talk Bob Cotton, test architect at Rally Software, will:

• Discuss the language of testing and how it impedes developers from reaching the real benefits of TDD.
• Cover rSpec, the Ruby framework for BDD.
• Show how Rally has leveraged these concepts for the definition of acceptance tests.

Presentation Download

Behavior Driven Development (.pdf)

Speaker

With over 12 years of developing and testing web applications, Bob has extensive experience testing applications using open source testing tools. From unit, load, functional and GUI testing Bob has applied many tools and techniques to testing large scale, SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. Most recently at Rally Software Development (www.rallydev.com), Bob has helped shape an Agile software methodology by including unique approaches to software test automation.

Automated testing, using tools such as FitNesse and Selenium, are integrated into the development process from the beginning of each iteration. Prior to joining Rally, Bob worked as the System Architect at SynXis Corp, where he helped build and test a high-volume (multi-million messages a day) hotel reservation system.

Bob holds a B.S. in computer science from George Mason University.

Sponsors

The April 2007 meeting sponsor is Rally Software.

From an initial pilot project to enterprise rollout, Rally helps companies succeed with Agile software development. Rally's family of Agile life cycle management products give teams the visibility and collaboration needed to deliver high-value software in rapid iterations, and its world-renowned coaching services help mentor teams to create internal Agile experts. Based in Boulder, Colo., Rally maps an incremental road to Agile adoption for thousands of subscribers from leading software vendors, Internet companies and corporate development teams. For more information, visit http://www.rallydev.com.