Applying Behavior Driven Development Practices and Tools to Low-Code Technology

• Autor(a) principal: Pulido, Nuno Miguel André
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/92297
• topic: Low Code Development; Behavior-Driven Development; OutSystems; Gherkin Scenarios; Automation Frameworks; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

One of the main reasons software projects fail is the lack of communication between stakeholders. Low Code Platforms have been recently growing in the software development market. These allow creating state-of-the-art applications with facilitated design and integration, in a rapid development fashion and as such, avoiding communication errors among stakeholders is indispensable to avoid regressions. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a practice that focuses on developing value-based software, promoting communication by bringing business people into development. The BDDFramework is an open-source testing automation framework within the Out- Systems environment. It allows describing test scenarios using the Gherkin syntax but it is not focused on enabling the BDD process. Our main challenge is: - How can we apply the BDD process in Low Code and support it from a technological point of view, considering the particularities of Low Code environments and having as case study the OutSystems platform? Is the BDDFramework prepared for this? We interviewed some people in the domain to understand their development and testing challenges and their experience with the BDDFramework. With the information gathered and after studying other existing BDD process supporting tools for other languages, we built a prototype that uses the existing BDDFramework and automates it, allowing scenarios to be described in text files, which helps the introduction of business people in the process. The prototype generates all the test structure automatically, reusing equal steps while detecting parameters in the Gherkin descriptions. We performed some real user testing to validate our prototype and we found that our solution was faster, easier, with better usability and we obtained more correct tests than with the previous approach - the BDDFramework alone. Testing in Low Code is still an area with a lot to explore and errors have a huge impact when development is very accelerated, so as communication errors tend to decrease we can start building software even faster and this is what BDD proposes to solve. With this prototype we have been able to demonstrate that it is possible to build a framework that will allow us to enable this process by taking advantage of the OutSystems language particularities to potentiate the BDD practice technologically, while setting a test standard for the OutSystems language.