How behavior-driven development and continuous delivery support each other

1. @lisacrispin
Lisa Crispin
With content from George Dinwiddie
Copyright 2020 Lisa Crispin
Behavior-Driven Development
& Continuous Delivery:
How do they fit together?
BDD CD

2. A little about me
Quality Owner, specializing in
observability
lisa@agiletester.ca
@lisacrispin
With Janet Gregory
New!

3. @lisacrispin
What I’ll talk about:
● Ways BDD can help shorten feedback loops
● Ways CD impacts BDD
● What can your team try?
Confidence

4. @lisacrispin
Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
● Structured conversations to elicit rules and examples
● Results in shared understanding across the team
● Examples become scenarios to guide development
From
https://cucumber.io/docs/bdd/

5. @lisacrispin
Continuous Delivery / Deployment (CD)
● Deploy small changes to production frequently at a
sustainable pace
● Lower risk
● Faster feedback

6. What’s in a deployment pipeline?

7. @lisacrispin
It’s not really linear
● Continuous delivery is a series of feedback loops
● Planning and coding are part of it
Plan, code,
deliver
Deploy, learn,
release

8. @lisacrispin
How can BDD help shorten feedback loops?
Observing &
Experimenting
Questioning &
Hypothesizing
Analysis
&
Learning

9. @lisacrispin
“Three Amigos” (or 4 or 5) meetings
● Product person, programmer, tester, + designer…
● Structured conversations (eg. example mapping)
● Purpose, business rules, examples for each story
● Groundwork for shared understanding

10. Example Mapping example
Story à
Rules à
Examplesà
Questions

11. @lisacrispin
Executable tests to guide development
● Turn examples into test scenarios with expected
behavior
● Business-readable specification
● Can be automated to provide regression test suites &
living documentation

12. Other BDD benefits
Slice features into small,
consistently sized stories
Explore how a capability will
be used before it’s built
Frequent deploy of
small changes, less risk
Deliver the “right thing”

13. @lisacrispin
Continuous Deployment (CD)
Busines
s
approva
l
Compilation/
unit testing
Create
deployment
artifact
Testing
stage 1
Testing
stage 2
Deployment Pipeline
Developer
Commit
Deployed
to
Production
Code is
merged
(master/trunk)
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous Delivery enhances BDD

14. @lisacrispin
Principles of CD support BDD
● Build quality in
● Work in small batches
● Computers perform repetitive tasks, people
solve problems
● Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement
● Everyone is responsible
https://continuousdelivery.com

15. @lisacrispin
Fast feedback
● From automated tests
● From production usage
● Use “learning releases” aka MVPs to get direct
feedback
○ Manage access via release feature toggles, canary
releases, dark launches
○ Get usage metrics, analyze errors

16. @lisacrispin
CD & BDD enable the continuous DevOps loop
● Learning from production flows back to discovery
process
● Refine, delete, add small changes
● Small, lower-risk new changes that add value flow
continually to production
https://www.quora.com/Is-DevOps-
easy-to-learn

17. @lisacrispin
How can your team
take advantage?

18. @lisacrispin
Already practicing CD, but no BDD?
Try a small experiment!
● Learn more about BDD (see resources list)
● Have an amigos meeting before your next iteration
planning meeting
● Discuss the goal, rules and examples for each story
● Before/during coding, write scenarios based on those
to guide development

19. @lisacrispin
Already doing BDD, but no CD?
With your whole team:
● Make a visual map of the path
to production
● Start talking about it!
● What can you automate?
● Apply the continuous delivery
principles

20. @lisacrispin
Build relationships
• Get people in every role/discipline engaged in thinking
about quality
• Get to know people in and outside of your team
• Ask for help, offer help
• Build trust so you can learn

21. @lisacrispin
Building a quality culture
• Transformative leaders
• Trust and psychological safety
• Whole team ”owns” product
• Focus on quality, not speed

22. @lisacrispin
Talk about it with your team
● How to build shared
understanding before
coding
● How to shorten cycle time,
feedback loops
● How to get value to
customers continually

23. @lisacrispin
A few resources
● Discovery: Explore Behavior Using Examples, by Seb Rose and
Gáspár Nagy
● Introducing Example Mapping, by Matt Wynne
● Continuous Delivery, by Jez Humble and David Farley
● A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, by Katrina Clokie
● Accelerate The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, by Dr.
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene KIm
● “The Three Amigos — All For One - One For All,” by George
Dinwiddie, Better Software
● “The Three Amigos Strategy of Developing User Stories,” by
George Dinwiddie, AgileConnection