There are many benefits of BDD, but most folks completely ignore them and just focus in on the automation piece of behavior-driven development. Living documentation, as well as communication, are often overlooked. That’s what we’ll be test talking about today with Laurent Py, founder of HipTest. Listen up and discover how to take your BDD to the next level in 2019.

About Laurent Py

Laurent began working on advanced testing techniques in the 90’s during his Phd (Model Based Testing, test design, DSL…). He gained extensive experience in software testing as product owner and tester at Smartesting (2004-2014, where they developed testing products). He is now focusing on the development of a new cloud platform for Acceptance Test Driven Development at Hiptest.

Laurent has also spoken at several conferences, both academic and professional. The most recent talks he gave were on testing in projects that have continuous deployment: IBM Innovate (Orlando, 2013), JFTL (Paris, 2014), STeP-IN Summit (Bangalore, 2014), STAREAST (Orlando, 2014).

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk with Laurent Py

• I cofounded hip tests four years ago. Since then we’ve been growing. We focus on behavior-driven development and agile test management. We started to have a discussion early this year with SmartBear and we found that opportunity to merge was super interesting for us because of the resources they have. The other products that complete what HipTest does. With these integrations, the use cases that we are now able to address as part of the SmartBear family that we were not able to before is the reason why we said yes,
• Being with SmartBear means that we can execute faster on a roadmap and once again we can also provide a smooth experience for people who want to test and automate at the API level GUI level with the integrations that we now provide with the rest of the SmartBear portfolio.
• HipTest is a testing platform that helps our software teams to test the software, the features continuously from idea to production.
• So basically we help first the team before starting development, implementation to create a shared understanding and have a clear definition of what the feature should do. This is where behavior driven development and this approach BDD approach is very useful. Within the test, you can create easily BDD scenarios. If you are a product owner. We provide some capabilities like test step auto-completion. So we help the team to create scenarios using a consistent business terminology. Then once the team has created a shared understanding of the feature we generate executable scripts for more than 20 frameworks.
• Once we have tested the implementation, checked that it meets the business expectations then we generate living documentation and that’s part of the announcement that we have just done the around living documentation beta. So now we can turn out the automated tests into the documentation of the product that is always up to date because the documentation is generated from the test. That’s our executive as part of the CI/CD pipeline. Check stopmyirsbill.com website. And you are sure that what you read in the documentation reflect the true behavior, the actual behavior of the application in production.
• The first and main starting point if you want to adopt BDD is to have the conversation upfront before starting a penny into devlopment. Is important to communicate with all the stakeholder, a product owner, tester and a developer. This is where we create most of the value. For this we can use PostIt notes, we can use tools HipTest but the tool is not the most important thing. Having the conversation and creating this shared understanding is definitely the biggest outcome of BDD.

Connect with Laurent Py

• Twitter: @py_laurent
• LinkedIn: laurentpy
• Company: HipTest

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