Behaviour Driven Development with Cucumber

Learn how to make sure everybody on the team ‘speaks the same language’ when it comes to the requirements

Behaviour-Driven Development, BDD, is an Agile methodology that will improve the understanding, communication, and collaboration between Software Developers, Testers, Business Analysts, and other parties involved in a software project. BDD is a process for communication, test automation, and living documentation at the same time. Thousands of agile teams are benefiting from the clearer understanding and better collaboration that BDD brings.

BDD allows you and the project stakeholders to have a clearer understanding of where the project is at any given time. You write features and scenarios in a plain, human-readable, language. These human-readable examples can be executed against your production code to verify the state of the project.

In this course, you’ll learn how to implement BDD techniques in your Java projects using Cucumber-JVM.

Why Attend

Learn how to drive the development using the desired behaviour of the system and add one more useful tool to your toolbox.

After completing this course you will have acquired the fundamental technical and non-technical skills required to begin using BDD.

Who Should Attend

Developers, Testers and Business Analysts will all benefit from the first day of the course where the focus is communication within the development team. The second day will focus on implementing BDD using Cucumber. Non-technical persons may find this to be on the edge of their comfort zone.

Practical Details

Language: English
Experiential, hands-on, interactive online learning with practical examples
Participants will be awarded a Mozaic Works certificate of completion

This Learning Program is Available on Demand

Agenda

The fundamental principles and practices of BDD
Translating examples into Gherkin – Cucumber’s format for executable specifications
Conversation patterns for discovering edge cases
The importance of a common language for problems and solutions
Using Example Mapping and Discovery Workshops to achieve shared understanding
Installing Cucumber and setting up your development environment
The TDD / BDD cycle
Techniques to keep your test code clean

Day 1 – BDD Fundamentals

The first day will focus on the process of BDD. The process Cucumber supports. There will not be any automation this day. Focus is on communication and collaboration.

You will learn how Example mapping can be used to transform a user story to concrete examples. Concrete examples will clarify misunderstandings and discover hidden rules. Concrete examples will help you write better automation.

Learning outcomes:

The fundamental principles and practices of BDD
The importance of Rules and Examples
Translating examples into Gherkin – Cucumber’s format for executable specifications
Conversation patterns for discovering edge cases
The importance of a common language for problems and solutions
Using Example Mapping and Discovery Workshops to achieve shared understanding
Roles and responsibilities on a BDD team

Day 2 – Implementing BDD with Cucumber

Day two will be used to automate the concrete examples found during day one. You will implement the examples using Cucumber-JVM. This is a solid day introducing test-first development using Cucumber.

You will learn to write executable specifications using Gherkin, the plain text format used by Cucumber. You will learn how to drive the implementation of a system step by step using Cucumber and see how the system gradually evolves. You will end up with a system that does what you want and is easy to test.

Non-technical people may find this day close to the edge of their comfort zone, but they are nevertheless more than welcome to attend and learn what the developers are using.

Learning outcomes:

Installing Cucumber and setting up your development environment
The TDD / BDD cycle
Writing your first scenario
Writing step definitions
Using parameters in step definitions
Techniques to keep your test code clean
Backgrounds, Tags, Tables, Scenario Outlines and other Gherkin tricks

More details and full agenda here

Prerequisites

All material needed will be available for the students afterwards.

The students are expected to bring a laptop with a development environment for Java installed.

This course is given in cooperation with Cucumber Ltd.

Meet Your Trainers

Thomas Sundberg

Software Developer | Author | Founder of Think Code AB

With more than 25 years in software development, Thomas is an independent consultant based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden’s leading technical university. After graduation, Thomas also taught at KTH. Thomas currently teaches Behaviour-Driven Development, BDD, with Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of Cucumber. Thomas has commit privileges on the open-source Cucumber project, and works in partnership with Cucumber Ltd. as well as Mozaic Works. As a consultant, trainer, and developer Thomas has created value for many teams around Europe. For the last ten years, Thomas has been an invited conference speaker at GeeCON, I T.A.K.E. Unconference, and European Testing Conference on topics including software craftsmanship, clean code, test automation,…

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