How BDD can save agile

As lead developer of Cucumber and author of The Cucumber Book, Matt gets asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.

When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and finally inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.

Presented at QCon London March 5th 2015
http://qconlondon.com/presentation/why-bdd-can-save-agile

Transcript

1. HOW BDD CAN SAVE AGILE @mattwynne | QCon 2015 | London
2. Does agile really need saving?
3. Scrum != Agile
4. Quality Communication Predictability
5. Technical discipline Collaboration Small pieces
6. How does BDD help?
7. Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
8. BDD is a tool or maybe even a process, I dunno… but…
9. BDD is a tool that facilitates interactions between individuals
10. BDD is a label but
11. I don’t like labels
12. Let’s talk about behaviour instead
13. BDD practitioners explore, discover, define, then drive out the desired behaviour of software using conversations, concrete examples and automated tests.
14. Explore Discover Define Drive out
15. Conversations Concrete examples Test-driven development
16. CONVERSATIONS
17. SOFTWARE IS MADE BY PEOPLE CONVERSATIONS MATTER BECAUSE
18. IGNORANCE IS THE BOTTLENECK CONVERSATIONS MATTER BECAUSE
19. Discovery Workshop Stories Examples Shared understanding Smaller stories Questions Business rules
20. EVERYONE HAS A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE CONVERSATIONS MATTER BECAUSE
21. CONCRETE EXAMPLES
22. MAKE SENSE TO EVERYONE CONCRETE EXAMPLES
23. ROOTED IN THE PROBLEM DOMAIN CONCRETE EXAMPLES ARE
24. Problem Domain Solution Domain
25. HELP BUILD A UBIQUITOUS LANGUAGE CONCRETE EXAMPLES PROVIDE
26. A SHARED SOURCE OF TRUTH CONCRETE EXAMPLES PROVIDE
27. SPLIT STORIES INTO SMALL PIECES CONCRETE EXAMPLES HELP YOU TO
28. TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
29. WARNING LIGHTS AUTOMATED TESTS ARE YOUR
30. REFACTORING THE BIT OF TDD THAT EVERYONE FORGETS IS
33. You can't have clean code without refactoring You can't refactor without good automated tests You can't stay agile without clean code
34. WHY? TDD FORCES YOU TO ASK
35. LISTENING TO THE TESTS BUT YOU WILL FAIL UNLESS YOU ARE
36. NO SHORT CUTS: EXCELLENT COMMUNICATION EXCELLENT CODE
37. THANKS. QUESTIONS? @mattwynne matt@cucumber.pro