Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems

Max Saperstone

Summary:

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored in source control repositories. Additionally, these given-when-then steps soon can grow to an extent where they are difficult to manage without an IDE, and nontechnical people lose interest. Using management tools, Max Saperstone shows how to manage these nontechnical steps and keep them in sync with the automaton in tools such as Git. He shows how to link tests to requirements, stories to development, and the traceability with continuous integration support. He also shares experiences of developing an open source product to help manage tests, with proven workflows at an enterprise level, for full team buy-in on both nontechnical and technical aspects of test case development.

Presenter Bio:

For almost a decade, Max Saperstone has been a test engineer focusing on test automation and the continuous integration/continuous delivery process. Max specializes in open source tools—Selenium, JMeter, AutoIT, Cucumber, and Chef. He has led several testing automation efforts, including developing an automated suite focused on web-based software to operate over several applications. Max also headed a major project developing an automated testing structure to run Cucumber tests over multiple test interfaces and environments, while developing a system to keep test data “ageless.” He is currently developing a new testing architecture for SecureCI to allow testing of multiple interfaces, custom reporting, and minimal test upkeep.