Chris Cowell – Cambia Health Solutions
Gathering requirements with behavior-driven development tools like Cucumber seems trivially simple at first, but at Cambia Health Solutions we discovered how hard these tools can be to use correctly and how quickly teams sour on them when they don’t understand their nuances. After two years of experimenting with Cucumber and learning how to harness its power, we’ve now made it an essential part of our development process.
Based on our success, I’ll share best practices, anti-patterns, and plenty of real-world examples to help you use Cucumber and tools like it more artfully and effectively. This talk is aimed at QA people, developers, UX designers, product owners, and dev managers who use Cucumber or other behavior-driven development tools to gather software requirements. You’ll learn how you might be using your BDD tool in unhelpful ways, how to write crisper and more understandable requirements, when you should (or shouldn’t!) rely on black-belt features like Cucumber’s scenario outlines and example mapping, and how to make it a pleasure for everyone on your dev team to write, read, and implement software requirements.
Although the talk looks at requirements through Cucumber’s lens, most of the content is relevant to anyone who reads or writes software requirements, no matter what tools or processes they use.
Chris Cowell, 2020 Technical Presentation, Paper, Slides
