23 Apr 2014
Easter treats: Buns, Beers & BDD
by GLiNTECH
With the nature of our business meaning we’ve always got consultants out and about working at client sites, it’s not every day that we have the whole GLiNTECH team under one roof. But as often as possible, we pull everyone together for a social catch up with a bit of a software twist. For example, for our last get-together, the guys from AxisAgile came into the office for an evening of lively chatter about all things Scrum and agile.
Ahead of the Easter break, our team got together again for an evening of fun, food and more big ideas. Having warmed up with beer battered fish, pork & fennel sausage rolls and chorizo pizzas - plus a good supply of beer from some local breweries - we sat down to dine on a main course of Behaviour Driven Development.
To help us digest the topic, we were fortunate to have John Smart come to the office and lead discussions. Being an agile coach, test automation specialist, world-renowned author and speaker we couldn’t really have asked for more expertise on the subject.
He gave a talk surrounding the idea of BDD: It’s not just Given... When... Then... where he discussed what he believed to be a misconception of BDD focusing on writing and automating SpecFlow-style scenarios. He argued that the full scope of BDD goes from requirements discovery and description through to driving technical design and implementation, helping testers be more efficient and even providing more accurate, and therefore useful, documentation.
You can view the presentation slides here.
A topic like this was certainly more appropriate for our technical team, but having events like this which mix interesting software discussion with a social occasion are also great for non-technical staff to become more involved with some key concepts and technologies driving our business. And having interaction from all our employees helps generate ideas about new things we can implement and how we can do what we do better.
As such, we’re always grateful to the local experts who generously give their time to our team and we very much look forward to the next speaker and next event. And hopefully for the next one we’ll be able to crack open some of the home brew we’ve got bubbling away...