I’m a big fan of the BDD Books by Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose, and I’ve read a lot about writing and improving scenarios, like Specification by Example by Gojko Adzic and Writing Great Specifications by Kamil Nicieja. I can recommend reading anything from Liz Keogh as well. Trying to apply their suggestions in my development work, I realized: specifications benefit from good writing. Writing benefits from good thinking. And so does design. Better writing, thinking, designing: this will make us do a better job at programming. Any effort put into these activities has a positive impact on the other areas, even on the code itself.

This article is part 2 of my review of the book “Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests”. I’ll continue to share some of my personal highlights with you.

Replace multiple steps with a higher-level step

If a test executes multiple tasks in sequence that form a higher-level action, often the language and the concepts used in the test explain the mechanics of test execution rather than the purpose of the test, and in this case the entire block can often be replaced with a single higher-level concept.

Review

After reading “Discovery - Explore behaviour using examples” by Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose, I picked up another book, which I bought a long time ago: “Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests” by Gojko Adzic, David Evans, Tom Roden and Nikola Korac. Like with so many books, I find there’s often a “right” time for them. When I tried to read this book for the first time, I was totally not interested and soon stopped trying to read it. But ever since Julien Janvier asked me if I knew any good resources on how to write good acceptance test scenarios, I kept looking around for more valuable pointers, and so I revisited this book too. After all, one of the author’s of this book - Gojko Adzic - also wrote “Bridging the communication gap - Specification by example and agile acceptance testing”, which made a lasting impression on me. If I remember correctly, the latter doesn’t have too much practical advice on writing goods tests (or scenarios), and it was my hope that “Fifty quick ideas” would.

I’ve just finished reading “Discovery - Explore behaviour using examples” by Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose. It’s the first in a series of books about BDD (Behavior-Driven Development). The next parts are yet to be written/published. Part of the reason to pick up this book was that I’d seen it on Twitter (that alone would not be a sufficient reason of course). The biggest reason was that after delivering a testing and aggregate design workshop, I noticed that my acceptance test skills aren’t what they should be. After several years of not working as a developer on a project for a client, I realized again that (a quote from the book):