In response to the questions people have asked me about my talk on The Hidden Costs of BDD Tools, I’ve created a couple dozen short videos. I’m going to tweet them out over the course of the next couple days with the hashtag #TitusOnBDD, and the videos will all be posted on my YouTube channel. If anyone wants to have a longer conversation about the topic, we can do that in the comments here.
As background, my colleagues at Sauce Labs and I have had numerous discussions over the past few years about the effectiveness of the BDD tools used by our clients. Nikolay decided to actually do something about it by writing articles and giving webinars discussing his concerns. At SauceCon this year, he, Josh and I did a panel session talking over our thoughts.
I decided to try to create a more comprehensive narrative to articulate the underlying issues for what I find problematic with BDD Tooling, and gave a webinar for Software Test Professionals on The Hidden Costs of BDD Tools. Like with most talks I give, there are things I want to tweak and explain better, but as it is I received some great feedback from people on it, including from Software Testing Weekly.
I also received a few dozen questions from people who watched it. Rather than just sending out my responses in an email, I decided that it would be fun to try to Tweet out each question along with an answer. I then decided that I should make a video of each of these as well. I’m not sure I fully appreciated the scope of what I signed up for, but I had a lot of fun with these. The goal was quick answers to each question, and some of them are more interesting than others. We’ll see how this goes and maybe I can make improvements if I do it again.
This post is not going to be a re-hash or even a summary of my thoughts on BDD, just a place to have a discussion. I’ll write separate posts if it makes sense for me to dig into specific points in more detail or provide examples.