Topic: Better Gherkin: Common pitfalls and how to overcome them
Many organizations are adopting Behavior Driven Development (or BDD) to build a shared understanding across business and technical domains. To that end, Gherkin has emerged as a popular BDD tool to document the intended behavior of a system in a way that can be clearly understood by everyone with the added benefit that these executable specifications can be transformed into automated tests.
Sounds easy, right?
Well, here’s the not so great news. Writing is an art and so is writing good Gherkin scenarios. In our experience, far too many teams who have adopted BDD practices, write Gherkin scenarios that are difficult to understand, brittle and prone to narrow use. In this talk we will discuss some of the common anti-patterns we’ve observed and provide tips and tricks for improving your Gherkin scenarios. With these tips, you’ll be writing Gherkin feature files like a pro!
Remember the Golden Gherkin Rule: Write Gherkin so that people who don’t know the feature will understand it!
Speakers: George Lively & Raj Indugula of LitheSpeed
George Lively has over 20 years of experience in Agile. He began with Extreme Programming (XP), using Agile Engineering practices like Test Driven Development. He has been a practitioner, coach, and trainer, working in small, medium, and large organizations in a variety of industries. For the last three years George has been a Senior Agile Coach at LitheSpeed. His day-to-day work with actual teams continues to inform his real world approach to solving big testing problems. Professional certifications: SPC 5, CSM Enabled to teach ICP-TST and a variety of SAFe classes, including SAFe DevOps.
Introduced to agile methods via Extreme Programming in 2003, Raj Indugula is a Principal Coach at LitheSpeed with over 17 years of hands-on experience with the pragmatic application of agile methods and XP-inspired code quality practices, and coaching teams on the adoption of Lean-Agile-DevOps practices. He has helped develop all roles, from executive leadership to engineering teams, in lean software development, process frameworks, product ownership, and agile engineering and testing practices. His passion is helping organizations improve their software delivery game by working alongside teams and individuals within the context of their work. He is also a certified and accredited trainer for Scaled Agile Academy, Scrum Alliance, and ICAgile across a wide spectrum of agile process and technical courses.
