Chicago ALT.NET User Group

October 2010 Meeting

SpecFlow: One Step closer to Executable Specifications

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

What if you could take the lessons you've learned with Test Driven Development to a whole new level? What if in this new paradigm you were able to involve business users much closer to your development process? What if you and your business users could reduce the number of conversions between the spoken language and the implemented behavior of the application?

Some of the keys to move toward that interesting scenario are: focus on the the expected user experience when interacting with the application and being able to express business logic in a language that can be exposed to non-technical stake holders and isn't manually converted to executable code by the programmer in a later step.

This is where SpecFlow comes into play to power your Aceptance Testing and Behavior Driven Development. You may have heard of Cucumber; Specflow is like Cucumber but for .NET.

In this presentation we will see how you can write your tests is natural language that can be at least reviewed by a business user and then directly executed without further coding in most cases.

We will see how to drive a web application from the SpecFlow plain text feature files, hopefully demonstrating how much more user centric this process is compared to testing lower level functions.

Video

Slides

Sample code

You can also download the sample project used in this presentation.

Pictures

Sergio Pereira has been developing software professionally since the mid 90's. After a short period of desktop application development, Sergio changed his focus to web development and never looked back. He's a strong believer in continuous improvement of himself, the processes, and the tools he uses in the software craft.

If you don't see Sergio in front of his computer screen, you will probably find him in front of an even bigger screen watching some live sports or a silly movie. You can find out more about Sergio on his blog or following @sergiopereira on Twitter.