Effective shift-left with BDD
An INFJ personality wielding brevity in speech and writing.
Shift-left testing is an approach where testing starts earlier in the product development lifecycle. It means “Test early and test often.”
To get a primer on shift-left testing and when and how it’s performed, check our blog on the same below
Let’s see how we can effectively shift left with the Behavior-driven development (BDD) approach.
BDD enables higher collaboration and communication across entire project stakeholders, right from Product owners to QA. In a high visibility approach like BDD, teams describe the product feature as to how an end-user would describe it in a simple plain text called Gherkin.
Stakeholders across the project rely on the same set of features/scenarios. These scenarios take the form of requirements, acceptance criteria, test cases, and test scripts in respective environments, thus becoming a single source of truth for the entire team.
BDD ensures these features, or a single source of truth as it’s called, gets built right using the easy and first-time-right formula, thereby fostering the shift-left testing process. Within this approach, scenarios get written well in advance, and testing and automation also kickstart parallel with the development.
This ever-growing collection sets up for a perfect regression suite. And since it brings the early involvement of testing, very few defects get leaked and detected at a later stage as most of the surface in the early stages and are fixed by working parallelly with the development team.
However, executing BDD testing is impossible without automation.
Watch SDET Manager, Dhanalakshmi Tamilarasan briefing this concept in a short video here
BDD & Automation: The inseparable duo
BDD makes test automation much easier to maintain. As the scenarios cover all the steps – the automation engineer simply needs to write a method/function to perform each of the step’s operations.
How it makes the test automation easier and realizes its actual value rests on the automating testing framework and tool one picks up. Depending on the agile maturity, you may have in place an array of CI/CD and application lifecycle management tools like Jenkins, Jira, Git or Atlassian, etc.
To make the transition to BDD easier, it’s vital to have a robust automated testing framework and tools that can integrate or work seamlessly with your existing software development infrastructure.
At Zuci, 90% of our clientele partner with us to realize the success of test automation, shift-left, and the setting up of CI/CD pipeline initiatives. We join hands with their in-house engineering team and help augment their testing process.
Zuci’s in-house test automation framework is prebuilt with interfaces and is well-connected to widely used tools – CI/ CD, test management, defect management, and cloud-hosted platforms.
To take a deeper look at Zuci’s test automation framework and how you can benefit from it, go here; to give a reading on how we employ BDD to effectively shift-left, go here.
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