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Collaborative QA - A Behavior-Driven Look at the Dev/Des Relationship - Dev/Des 2021

Software developers offer their own technical perspective when actualizing new application features.

But so too do designers, who, through their own lens, bring to the team a unique UX-focused approach to product development. Add in product management personnel, business stakeholders, and Quality Assurance, and suddenly the need arises for a common language to support a shared vision and understanding of product goals — and product quality. Enter BDD, or Behavior-Driven Development. BDD is an agile testing method that centers around stories written in a unified vocabulary to describe application behavior. It's a leading approach to address — and enhance — product quality.

Three questions arise: how does it work in real life? Is it suitable for cross-functional teams comprising designers and developers? And can it be automated, following suit with our other des/dev practices? Our talk will introduce the Squish GUI Tester as a test automation tool featuring unique support for the BDD approach and dedicated support for the Qt framework. We'll pay special attention to cross-functional collaborative teams, and how the BDD methodology unites designers and developers in a shared mission for top-notch product quality. To do so, we'll look at the ways BDD brings out the synergy between a designer's user experience know-how, and a developer's technical knowledge of feature implementation, on our way to ensuring quality — before the first line of code is even written.