BDD living documentation for Product Owners

Question

We have been using BDD in our team for over a year now. The jobs, that run our tests generate a published report in business language, that anyone is available to read.

We find these very useful inside our team for when tests fail etc, but our business do not seem to find this documentation useful as a communication tool. I'm not sure if it is the GWT language or the format of our report or just a general lack of interest.

If anyone is using the same approach have you found that the business find this living documentation useful?

If so how have you made this possible?

Any experience shared would be great.

Answer 1

To be honest this sounds like the very issue that seems to have split the BDD tools. You either have tools that produce specifications during the test runs, ao that you know exactly what your system is capable of doing. Or you have tools that consume specifications so that you know how compliant your application is with the specifications.

In the first case this means that tooling like mspec is used to translate code into a readable specification which can be presented back to the business so they can verify it. My experience is very much like yours, they aren't interested. It simply is an overhead in the process they can do without.

In the second case however we catch them at a point where they are much more engaged. They want development to occur so they get a positive benefit, and they are very happy to tell us how they want it. I have found this is the time to use BDD specifications. In fact it has several advantages done this way round.

The specification only has to be reviewed once by the business. If they are involved in making the change to the specification then it can be treated as a formal criteria during every testing cycle, if we meet it, we are done, no need to get them to review it.

Answer 2

I have been involved in a BDD framework creation where in we created BDD framework using Calabash , Jbehave and Thucydides and another one we used ,in that we created reports using BDD and rest all part was written in Selenium - Java - TestNG . So Frame work used was Selenium and coding language was Java , with unit test framework TestNG.

I have seen your problem ,for our case also we have presented a first draft to the customer and he got impress by the way of implementation we did.

So my question to you is , can you please share some feedback or some story pattern which you followed in your project. So that I can help you or probably we can compare code of both of us.

In addition we have some projects going in our company where in customer requirements used to come in Requirement.story pattern and testers start working on the story using Test Driven Development. It actually helped us a lot. But yeah I would like to know from your end , as so far my experience with BDD is running smoothly.