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Michael Stephenson has started a new Wiki page over on the TechNet Wiki that is all about Behaviour Driven Development with BizTalk which focuses on developing software that fits with the way the business works. At the time of writing this was what he had made available:
This page is intended as a place to help you explore the use of behaviour driven development techniques and how it can be applied to BizTalk development.
Behaviour Driven Development is an agile software development practice that changes the way we do testing as a developer to focus on defining the behaviour of software using business language and allowing us to work closely with non technical people to agree the specification for what the software should do. In this process we write features using the standard user story type approach and within that acceptance tests using the Gherkin syntax of Given/When/Then. An example could be:
Feature: Employee Promotion Rules
Scenario: Level 4 Employee should not be promoted regardless of score
BDD is not a replacement for test driven development but should enhance it to give you a number of significant additional benefits. For more background on BDD please refer to wikipedia
In the .net world there are a number of tools available to help you implement BDD they are listed below:
In most of the articles we have written for BizTalk and BDD we have used Specflow but the principles are equally transferrable to other implementations.
Below are a number of different resources showing how BDD can be applied to different aspects of BizTalk development.
Michael Stephenson has produced a pair of videos which are available on cloudcasts.net in which he outlines firstly what behaviour driven development is and how it can help BizTalk developers and then in the 2nd video he walks through a practical example of using the technique. Part 1 - http://tinyurl.com/84j78mo
Part 2 - http://tinyurl.com/6n72toy
This article talks about how to use BDD techniques to develop BizTalk Business Rules.http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/07/13/150226.aspx
This article talks about how to use Specflow to help develop and test maps. http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2012/07/13/150230.aspx
Andy Davis has also written an article about using a specification base class to help you test maps using BDD techniques also. This article is particularly useful to demonstrate a quick way to test individual field mappings http://www.andy-davis.co.uk/?p=264
The techniques in both articles could also be combined together to create a powerful approach suited to anything from a simple map to a very complicated one which would also benefit from the documentation that specflow would offer.
In this article it discusses how people using older versions of BizTalk where Specflow may not be supported in your version of Visual Studio can use a different technique with BizUnit 2 to still achieve the same end results of having a BDD approach to acceptance testing. http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2011/11/04/147577.aspx As a follow on from the article about using a style of implementation of BDD with BizUnit 2 for BizTalk 2006 R2 implementations the below article shows how you can use MSBuild to generate documentation from your test cases so you get a similar output from your build process where you have nice feature documentation for all of your acceptance tests. http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2011/12/01/147911.aspx
If you have tips and hints on this subject why not get involved and add your expert insights.
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