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I am a proponent of Behavior Driven Development, mainly with Cucumber and RSpec, and at my current gig (a Microsoft shop) I am introducing SpecFlow as a tool to help with testing.

I'd like to get the business analysts on my team involved in writing the features and scenarios, but they are put off by the "technical" aspect of it, meaning creating the files in Visual Studio (or even having Visual Studio on their machines). They want to know if we can put all the scenarios for a feature in Jira.

What I'm looking for is suggestions for a workflow that will work well with BA types that are accustomed to project management/work tracking tools like Jira (we also use Greenhopper).

Robert S.
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Part of your job as a developer is to map your tools and ideas to the tools and ideas that your stakeholders use. Domain-Driven Design (not BDD) can certainly help in this regard, because it can assist in creating the "ubiquitous," common language by which you and your stakeholders can communicate.

But these folks have no interest in your software design architecture; they are only interested in solving their problems from their perspective. So you need to be able to communicate your ideas in their language, which means taking the concepts in BDD, and translating it into the tools and terms that they understand, and vice versa.

Robert Harvey
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What I ended up doing is installing Visual Studio 2010 Express on their machines and setting up the SpecFlow templates. I showed them how to add a .feature file. We discussed how the features and scenarios should be written and off they went.

I also showed them how to do the basic commits and pushes with TortoiseGit.

Robert S.
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You shouldn't force the business analysts to use Visual Studio to get your BDD process running smoothly. This is a tool for developers, not for the business.

SpecFlow has a command line tool that can generate the requires tests based on .feature files. This would allow you to create a build script that gather .feature files from somewhere, generate the .cs files, compile them, and execute the tests. If your business analysts prefer to use Jira, then you should make a tool that extracts .feature files from Jira, at least if it is practical and possible. I don't know Jira enough to say whether or not it is practical.

Remember any good software solution should be based around the processes and needs of the user; it should not dictate new processes for the user. And in this case, the user is the business analysts.

Pete
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