John Ferguson Smart - BDD in Action: Behavior-driven development for the whole software lifecycle

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Uncertaintys the muse of all thats new,And ignorance the space in which she plays;A years enough to prove a vision true,But we could prove it false in only days.We dream, and chase our dream, and never fearTo fail, and fail. Up, up! And on again,But ask us to pursue anothers goalsAnd failure makes us mice where we were men.Ah, best laid plans! Where were you at the endWho chained us and constrained us from the start?We knew you made a fickle, fragile friend;You tricked us when you claimed you had a heart!We thought less travelled roads would see us winningIn places other fools had feared to strayIf only we had known from the beginningThe ignorance we found along the way.And yet, a list of dangers and disastersFilled out, and scanned, and added to some moreWould still have left out some of what we masteredWe didnt know we didnt know before.We planned our way with maps wed made alreadyAssuming the terrain would be the same,Expecting well-paved roads to keep us steadyAnd any local creatures to be tame.We loaded up our caravans and wagonsWith good advice, best practices and toolsBut didnt spot the legendHere be dragons!So we got burnt, again. They say that foolsRush in, and yet we count ourselves as wise,We praise each others skill and raise a glassTo intellectignoring the demiseOf expeditions just as skilled as ours.When they return, worn out, their pride in shreds,We laugh and say, A death march! You expectSuch things to fail. And in our clever headsIts obviousat least in retrospect.The dragons of our ignorance will slay usIf we dont slay them first. We could be braveAnd work for kings who dont refuse to pay usWhen were delayed because we found their cave.They say that matter cannot be created,A fundamental principle and law,While dragons keep emerging, unabated;As many as you slay, theres still one more.Our ignorance is limitlessbe grateful,Or else wed find weve nothing left to learn;To be surprised by dragons may be fateful,But truth be told, its best laid plans that burn.We could seek out the dragons in their dungeonsAnd tread there softly, ready to retreat;We could seek other roads, postponing large ones,And only fight the ones we might defeat.The world could be a world of dragon slayersAnd stand as men and women, not as mice;The joy that comes from learning more should sway us;The fiercest dragons wont surprise us twice.Discover tiny dragons, be they few,And all the mightiest, with equal praiseUncertaintys our muse of all thats new,And ignorance the space in which she plays.

Liz Keogh

Since its modest beginnings as a coaching experiment over a decade ago, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) has taken off in a way I never would have imagined. Id like to tell you how it started, and why I believe it is more relevant today than it has ever been.

When I first started working on BDD back in 2003, the software industry was going through a revolution. It was a time of possibility, with everything I knew about enterprise software delivery open to question. Two years earlier, a group of software professionals had come together to formulate the Agile Manifesto, and the year after that, in 2002, I was fortunate enough to join some of the pioneers of this new movement. In April of that year, I was hired in the newly opened London office of ThoughtWorks, Inc., a software consulting company at the forefront of the agile movement. Their chief scientist Martin Fowler was one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and a few years earlier had written Refactoring (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999), which had a profound effect on how I thought about software. He was also on the first XP project at Chrysler with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham. It is safe to say his agile credentials are pretty solid, and he had joined the team at ThoughtWorks because they worked in a way that resonated with those values.

At this point I was over ten years into my career and I thought I was a decent programmer. That didnt last very long. I was constantly amazed by the talent of the people I was working with and the game-changing nature of the things I was encountering, things we now take for granted. My first tech lead turned out to have invented continuous integration, which would have been even more intimidating if he hadnt been such a thoroughly nice guy. That seemed to be a common theme among the early agilists. They were without exception generous with their knowledge, generous with their time, and humble about their discoveries and achievements.

I had some great mentors in my early years at ThoughtWorks. I was encouraged to try things Id never done beforecoaching skeptical programmers, reaching out to anxious testers, and engaging with suspicious business folks. This, then, was the context in which BDD was born. It was a response to a triple conundrum: programmers didnt want to write tests; testers didnt want programmers writing tests; and business stakeholders didnt see any value in anything that wasnt production code. I didnt think I was inventing a methodologyI was just trying to teach TDD to a bunch of programmers without scaring off the testers.