Our NDC 2011 Slides: SpecFlow & BDD

Here are the slides from the two presentations Gaspar and I did last week at the Norwegian Developers Conference 2011.

NDC 2011 - SpecFlow: Pragmatic BDD for .NET

NDC 2011 - Building .NET Applications with BDD

The videos should be published soon on the NDC homepage.

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Speaking at the Norwegian Developers Conference 2011

Gaspar and I were invited to the Norwegian Developers Conference.

We will hold two sessions:

• SpecFlow: Pragmatic BDD for .NET
  (hopefully with a guest appearance by Dale of Mono fame)
• Building .NET applications with BDD

Thanks to Jonas Fellesø and Jakob Bradford for inviting us!

The agenda of this conference is crazy! It is a great honor to speak among so many masterminds of our industry.

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SpecFlow: The Awakening

Recent internet fame and a trip to the East are evidence that SpecFlow is growing up and getting around.

So I think it is time to unveil to the world the first 10 month in the life of SpecFlow. Some might say: "From birth to adolescence", some might refer to the "The Awakening":

(watch in HD for best experience)

It's amazing to really see open-source at work. Thanks to all the committers!
I hope SpecFlow is striding forward into a bright future and I wish it all the best on its way to adulthood and greatness.

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Video created with gource and ffmpeg on my MacBook with the following commands:

gource -1280x720 -s 0.1 -r 60 -o ppm.out

ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i ppm.out -vcodec libx264 -fpre /opt/local/share/ffmpeg/libx264-max.ffpreset -threads 0 specflow_20110218.x264_max.avi

Thanks to pweibel for the instructions.

Hanselminutes 248: Executable Specifications with Gojko Adzic, Jonas Bandi and Aslak Hellesoy

Check out the Hanselminutes Episode with Gojko, Aslak and me about Executable Specifications, BDD, ATDD, Cucumber and SpecFlow.

I felt like a dwarf among giants with Gojko and Aslak on the line.

However I had the feeling that the conversation was not as coordinated as it could have been. For a three people interview I think the time was too short. There is much more to say about Specification by Example, Literal Automation, BDD and ATDD...

To get started with SpecFlow check out the following links:

• Main Site: www.specflow.org
• Source Code and Wiki on GitHub
• Getting Started
• Google Group
• Free TekPub Screencast

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SpecFlow 1.5 introducing Step Intellisense in VisualStudio

SpecFlow is aiming at providing pragmatic BDD for .NET.

SpecFlow 1.5 comes with Intellisense for step-completion in VisualStudio 2010:

When you are writing feature files, you get Intellisense after Given/When/Then/And/But keywords.
As usual you can trigger Intellisense with Ctrl-Space.

The feature is switched off by default. You have to enable it under Menu –> Tools –> Options then choose SpecFlow. In the Editor Settings set 'Enable Intellisense' to True:

SpecFlow can be downloaded from GitHub.
SpecFlow 1.5 comes with various improvements and fixes. The full changelog is here.

Keep your specs flowing!

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Speaking at DNUG Bern about BDD and SpecFlow

Next Monday I will give a presentation about BDD and SpecFlow at the .NET User Group Bern.

Registration is on the XING Group of DNUG Bern.

Thanks to the organisators for inviting me.

BDD Antipattern: Business readable but no business involved

Marcus blogged about using ATDD in projects of rewriting legacy applications. He describes the problem of missing business involvement in those kind of projects.

He describes a possible approach for a project like this and a technical setup how to bind formalized examples (scenarios) to the new application.

What I miss in his explanations is any advice how to get from the legacy application to the formalized examples (scenarios). In my experience that is a very important aspect and I am afraid that many developers ignore or underestimate the importance of this for the whole BDD process!

Finding the relevant examples, formalize them in a maintainable way that can drive the development process and formulating them in a business readable language is is a lot of work and has to be justified and has also to be made transparent to stakeholders.

I would ask: Is the business involved in this process at all? Is any stakeholder except the developers interested in those examples at all?

If the answer to those questions is 'no', I am not sure if it makes sense to take the effort to go for scenarios in a business readable format. (note that I still think formalized examples do make sense, but not in a business readable format)

The real value of  business readable examples lies in the discussions between stakeholders they provide a base for. They should be the baseline for prioritizing and re-thinking the functionality of the application. If there is no chance of involving business, they loose pretty much all of their value.

Business readable examples have to be an artifact that business cares about! Else there is the imminent risk that the whole BDD effort degrades to a petty effort of over-eager developers (I have been one of those, believe me).

Our BDD workshops at SkillsMatter Progressive .NET Tutorials

Last week Gaspar and I held two workshops at the Skillsmatter Progressive .Net Tutorials in London:

Gaspar and Christian have each written a summary here and here.

Altogether I think the workshops were quite successful and the feedback from the audience was very positive. However when I watched the presentations online I was shocked by my bad english. I definitely need more practice ...

The presentations are available online:

• Day 1: Driving an ASP.NET MVC application outside-in with SpecFlow
• Day 2: Advanced Topics of Behavior Driven Development with SpecFlow examples

Speaking at Skillsmatter Progressive .Net Tutorials in London

Gojko and Wendy invited Gaspar and me to give two workshops at the Skillsmatter Progressive .Net Tutorials on May 12-14 in London.

In the first workshop on Thursday we will demonstrate how to drive the development of an ASP.NET MVC2 application outside-in with SpecFlow.

In the second workshop on Friday we will talks about advanced topics of behavior driven development with SpecFlow examples.

I am very excited to present at this conference and I am looking forward to meet some of the defining members of the progressive .Net community.

Thanks also to TechTalk for sponsoring our stay in London.

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