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Seth Cohn: "Behat: Human-Readable Automated Testing"

Date: 
Thursday, December 19, 2013 - 6:30pm
Location: 

Drupal Nights

Davenport Conference Room
25 1st Street
Cambridge, MA 02141

Event Type: 
Category: 

Behat is a tool that makes behavior driven development (BDD) possible. With BDD, you write human-readable stories that describe the behavior of your Drupal site. These stories can then be auto-tested against your website, whether in the midst of development, or on a live site. And yes, it’s as cool as it sounds!

Behat, if embraced by enough Drupal folks, has the potential to vastly improve the way we build and test Drupal websites. Testing language can be developed by module maintainers, and allow nearly codefree testing to be developed by everyone, as needed, per site.

Behat IS NOT unit testing nor a specification testing tool. Behat is a Scenario-oriented BDD framework with functional testing capabilities as part of a communication process between stake-holders and developers. Think Agile User Stories meets Selenium.

Behat is currently used to test Drupal.org, allowing a variety of coders to work on a single site, and ensure that no existing functionality will break as they add new features. Or as it's migrated from one version to another. Imagine that on your site. We will review Behat (and Mink, and related code), how to use it with Drupal, Drush, and the existing modules/code to support that. We will demo live testing, and so how easy it is to write tests, with and without code.

Presenter: 
Seth Cohn

Seth Cohn is currently Technical Lead at BioRAFT, and spends a great deal of his time focusing on system engineering and best practices. He's presented at DrupalCon, and a number of DrupalCamps around the world. He's been a Drupaller for about 9 years, and tech-editted 'Pro Drupal 7 for Windows Developers'. A former elected official in New Hampshire, he authored and passed the nation's first state level law for encouraging governmental Open Source and Open Data.