It’s been awhile since myself and my colleague Dan Claudiu Pop have had our presentation at RTC, but given that this experience has had an impact on our testing perspective, we decided to write a few lines on how it was and what it meant to us.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that many colleagues share our opinions on software testing and this alone was enough to get us through the emotions we had that day, simply because we knew that we were speaking the same language. More and more software testers believe in the unity of the team, without the need of separating the tester (improperly called QA by many still) and developer roles.

We decided to talk about “Our experience with BDD in Python”, and throughout the presentation, we did exactly that: we talked about BDD as we understood and practiced it. We wanted to avoid “best practices” and “how to” terminology, because we didn’t want to teach others how to apply this methodology. We simply wanted to share our knowledge on the item, how we applied it and what are the challenges we are facing with.

Shortly after the presentation has begun, we understood that this was the correct approach. People were drawn to what we had to say and we felt that the issues we were exposing were issues they also had encountered.

I don’t know if we managed to answer all of their questions, but as long as we got the audience thinking about our subject and comparing the items we presented with the challenges they are facing day to day, then the presentation was a success.

There’s no golden formula which, when applied, it magically solves all issues on a project. But as long as everybody has understood our message - communication and collaboration is everything - then we definitely can say we are on the right track.

You can see the presentation here - http://testpy.github.io/RTC-presentation/