Michelle Lauer: "From User Personas to Testing: A Project Manager's Journey towards Behat"

With a strong desire to reduce our technical & product debt, or at the very least stop adding more, our team explored options to optimize our QA process. We have landed at the beginning of a new journey starting with user personas and ending with automated testing.; behavior driven development (BDD) focuses on the users' experience as the primary deliverable.

"Behat is a tool that makes behavior driven development (BDD) possible. With BDD, you write human-readable stories that describe the behavior of your application. These stories can then be auto-tested against your application. And yes, it’s as cool as it sounds!"

The Process

• Create personas. Understand "who" is your user base.
• Write user stories. Figure out what they need/want.
• Write Behat tests. Make the desired outcome testable.
• Develop features. Match your specifications.
• Run Behat test suites. Confirm you didn't break any existing functionality.

In addition to giving detailed examples, showing snippets of "human-readable" code, and running tests live, I'll share approaches to reach optimal code coverage. I am pleased to share this collaboration framework that allows stake holders, developers and everyone in between to finally speak the same language. Easily defined and agreed upon goals, written by both the planning and development teams means a target that can be reached. I will share all of the resources needed to start a Behat initiative in your organization.