Trip report from the Ukrainian Testing Days

Last weekend I was invited to Odessa, Ukraine for the Ukrainian Testing Days, a conference that Andrii Dzynia co-organized. Andrii has organized public testing dojos in the Ukraine in the past. He asked me to put the reports from their sessions on my blog in an English translation. I think he does great work there for the Ukrainian community. So, I was eager to see that community in action. I had a pleasant trip, staying in Odessa was very comfortable to me, especially since Julia Cherniak dropped me from the airport, and led me around in town on the first day. Here is a full report from my roughly two days in the Ukraine.

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Testautomation Coderetreat No. 1 – A report

Last Saturday we had the first testautomation coderetreat in Munich. Woohoo! This was a kickstart for this new coderetreat format – besides the original one from Corey Haines, and the Legacy Coderetreat format from J.B. Rainsberger. Here is my report from the facilitator’s point of view and with some hints about what I am going to try at different other follow-up coderetreats.

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The BDD pitfall

Last week I went to the 2bd SoCraTes conference, the German Software Craftsmanship and Testing conference. We did two days of open space discussions, and we all had great fun. One thing though that caused me some extensive amount of trouble, was the amount of sessions around BDD.

Some time ago, I wrote about the given/when/then-fallacy. But this time was different. Despite the amount of emphasize that BDD puts on the ubiquitous language, I was shrugged by the fact that folks were pointing to different things while talking about BDD: It seems BDD suffers from the same thing that it tries to prevent: having a common understanding about stuff.

I don’t know where this particularly comes from, and I also saw a couple of bad scenarios when it comes to the usage of tools like Cucumber or JBehave. I don’t consider myself a BDD expert, and people pointed out that I do something different around acceptance tests. Still I thought to expose some of my thoughts about some of the examples that I ran across recently – and helped out improving. Here’s my though process on two of these scenarios.

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