Interesting Talk: "Find the Right Abstraction Level for Your Tests"

Last month I attend this great talk by Gerard Meszaros at the Craft Conference in Budapest:

• Find the Right Abstraction Level for Your Tests

Some resources for Specification By Example and Behavior-Driven Development

Last Monday I attended the second event of Barcelona Software Craftsmanship.

Viktor Farcic and Jordi Falguera gave a talk about Specification By Example (SBE) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).

I really did like the talk, especially because it was enriched with their own experiences applying SBE in different projects.

For some people in the audience SBE was not a completely new concept, for some others it was. In either case, the topic generated a lot of interest and many questions.
Those who were already using it wanted to hear about a different approach to it (there are probably as many approaches as teams and projects).
Those who were just starting or planning to use it in their projects, were more interested in practical how-tos, ways to overcome possible obstacles and other stories from the trenches. The same goes for the people (like me) that knew about SBE through Godjko Adzic's great book or have heard or read about it in talks or posts.
Finally, I could imagine the brains of the people hearing about it for the first time, churning wildly, like mine was when I started to read Godjko Adzic's book, imagining how SBE could impact their projects, thinking in all the possibilities opening before them and in how they could get there.

To sum up when the talk ended, we were left wanting for more.

For that reason I'd like to share in this post several interesting links that I have come across while learning about SBE, so that, they can help other people interested in it to learn more and to compare some of the different approaches and tools that exist for SBE.

Dan North's original BDD post: Introducing BDD
and its great What’s in a Story? post.

Books:

• Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing by Gojko Adzic.
• Specification by Example by Godko Adzic.
• The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne.

Talks:

• On Behavior-Driven Development Dan North and Liz Keogh.
• Behavior-driven Development by Liz Keogh.
• BDD: Step Away from the Tools by Liz Keogh.
• BDD: Busting the myths by Gojko Adzic.
• Growing software from examples by Seb Rose.
• Especificaciones ejecutables, acercando negocio y desarrollo Vicenç García Altés.
• Behaviour Driven Development and Cynefin by Liz Keogh.
• On BDD, Cucumber, Hexagonal Architecture by Matt Wynne.
• Reinventing software quality by Gojko Adzic.
• Using Cucumber for BDD and Agile Acceptance Testing by Gojko Adzic.

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PS: The great thing it's that Viktor and Jordi have proposed a BDD Workshop on March 3, 2014, so that we can practice how to write specifications.

Interesting talk: "Challenging requirements"

I've just watched this great talk by Gojko Adzic, the author of the Specification by Example book that I'm currently reading:

• Challenging requirements

Thanks to Guillermo Pascual for recommending it in the Aprendices community.

Some talk highlights:

Refuse solutions to unknown problems:
understand what the real problem is and solve that.

Refuse suggestions to use a particular technology:
you know IT better than they do (if not, why have they hired you?).

Don't rush into solving the first problem they give you:
keep asking "why" (or "how would this be useful") until you get to the money.

Know your stakeholders:
who is going to use this and why?

Don't start with stories!:
Start with a very high level example of how people will use the system.

Great products come from understanding the real problem and whose problem it is.