My software company never did BDD or even TDD before. Testing before meant to simply try out the new software some days before deployment.
Our recent project is about 70% done. We also use it as a playground for new technologies, tools and ways of developement. My boss wanted that I switch to it to “test testing”.
I tried out Selenium 2 and RSpec. Both are promising, but how to catch up months of developement? Further problems are:
- new language
- never wrote a line of code by myself
- huge parts are written by freelancer
- lots of fancy hacking
- no documentation at all besides some source comments and flow charts
All I was able to was to do was to cover a whole process with Selenium. This appeared to be quite painfully (but still possible), since the software was obivously never meant to be testet this way. We have lots of dynamically generated id ´s, fancy jQuery and much more. Dont even know how to get started with RSpec.
So, is it still possible to apply BDD to this project? Or should I run far away and never come back?
Before you start – have you asked your boss what he values from the testing? I’d clarify this with your boss first. The main benefits of system-level BDD are in the conversations with business stakeholders before the code is written. You won’t be able to get this if all you’re doing is wrapping existing code. At a unit level, the main benefits are in questioning the responsibilities of classes and their behavior, which, again, you won’t be able to get. It might be useful for helping you understand the value of the application and each level of code, though.
If your boss just wants to try out BDD or TDD it may be simpler to start a new project, or even grab an existing project from someone else to wrap some tests around. If he genuinely wants to experiment with BDD over legacy code, then it may be worth persisting with what you have – @Esko’s book suggestion rocks. Putting higher-level system tests around the existing functionality can help you to avoid breaking things when you refactor the lower-level code (and you will need to do so, if you want to put tests in place). I additionally recommend Martin Fowler’s “Refactoring”.
RSpec is best suited to applying BDD at a unit level, as a variant of TDD. If you’re looking to wrap automated tests around your whole environment, take a look at Cucumber. It makes reusing steps a lot simpler. You can then call Selenium directly from your steps.
I put together a page of links on BDD here, which I hope will help newcomers to understand it better. Best of luck.