Presented at the Cleveland WPF User Group on October 16, 2012

1. Spec-ing out
Your Workflow
with SpecFlow
SARAH DUTKIEWICZ
SARAH@CLETECHCONSULTING.COM

2. Agenda
 Brief Intro to ATDD & BDD
 .NET Tools for ATDD & BDD
 Workflow
 Gherkin
 SpecFlow overview
 Demo

3. What are ATDD & BDD?
ATDD → Acceptance Test Driven
Development
BDD → Behavior Driven
Development
Both build on the concepts of Test
Driven Development (TDD)

4. Behavior Driven Development
 Goes beyond unit testing and looks at the system as a whole
 Top down/ outside in
 Describes how the application is going to be used through
executable examples
 The question is “What’s the intended behavior?”
 What should it do?

5. BDD Guidelines
 Test method names should be sentences – helpful for finding failing
tests and understand what the behavior class does
 Use “behavior” instead of “test”
 Requirements are considered behaviors
 Ubiquitous language (gherkin)
 As a … I want… so that …
 Given… When… Then
 Criteria should be executable

6. Two Types of BDD
 xSpec
 Unit test level
 Includes NSpec and Machine.Specifications
 xBehave
 Higher level acceptance testing
 Includes Nbehave and SpecFlow

7. ATDD
 Subset of BDD, focusing on the acceptance criteria
 Criteria first, then tests written, then code
 Document that describes the behaviors in the system
 Detail out the specification – specific business rules and any other
specifics to help devs understand
 Defects are discovered quicker – in discussing the acceptance
criteria rather than waiting for testing
 High level examples of how the software will be used

8. Collaboration among product owners, developers,
and testers (Three Amigos)
Product owners write gherkin
Developers write code against gherkin
Testers ensure the gherkin works

9. Collaboration Breeds Innovation

10. .NET ATDD/BDD Tools
 xBehave
 StoryQ
 SpecFlow
 xSpec
 Nspec
 Machine.Specifications

11. Workflows
TDD
Red
ATDD
Specify
Refactor Green
Deliver Develop

12. Examples
Tests Verify Requirements

13. Gherkin
Feature: Collaboration
In order to ensure successful product development,
I want to collaborate with the team in all phases.
Scenario: The Goal of the Product Owner
Given I am the Product Owner
When I write feature files
Then developers and testers have documentation to help ensure that the product is what I want.
Scenario: The Goal of the Developer
Given I am the Developer
When I have the feature files
Then I can write the code for those features
Scenario: The Goal of the Tester
Given I am the Tester
When the Developer is done writing the code for a feature
Then I can test the code to make sure it fulfills that feature’s requirements.

14. More Gherkin – Conjunctions!

15. SpecFlow - Platforms
 Supports the following platforms:
 .NET Framework
 Silverlight
 Windows Phone
 Mono

16. SpecFlow - Installation
 MSI file for Visual Studio 2008 integration
 NuGet
 Visual Studio Gallery

17. SpecFlow - Test Runner Support
 Visual Studio 2012 built-in test runner
 ReSharper
 SpecRun

18. SpecFlow Workflow
• Three Amigos
ATDD • Talk about features
Specify • Write gherkin
• Write code to fulfill
those features
• Run the feature tests
Deliver Develop • Fix code to meet
features if they
aren’t passing.
Once all tests past • Retest
Once all acceptance criteria
has been fulfilled

19. DEMO

20. Resources
 Gherkin
 Cucumber Project Documentation on GitHub
 Books
 Cucumber & Cheese: A Testers Workshop by Jeff Morgan
 The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and
Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy
 Specification by Example by Gojko Adzic
 SpecFlow
 C# ATDD on a shoestring (or the complete guide to SpecFlow &
Nunit in Visual Studio 2010 Express) on WatirMelon by Alister Scott

21. Contact Information
 Twitter: @sadukie
 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=27521335
 Email: sarah@cletechconsulting.com