Agile Requirements Discovery, BDD, TDD, and Test Automation workshops coming to Sydney and Melbourne in December!

Here is the line-up of what's on offer in Sydney and Melbourne.We have some exciting Agile Requirements Discovery, BDD, TDD and Test Automation workshops in Sydney and Melbourne coming up in December, including a new workshop on state-of-the-art Agile Requirements Discovery, and updated course material in our other BDD/TDD and Test Automation classes.

• Advanced Agile Requirements Workshop (1 day)
• BDD Development Practices Workshop (2 days)
• Automated Acceptance Testing with WebDriver and Thucydides (2 days)

Advanced Agile Requirements Workshop (1 day)

Requirements are at the heart of every project. How you describe and transmit these requirements often makes the difference between a successful project and a failure. Learn how to discover, document, and communicate about the requirements that really matter, in a way that will help the team deliver valuable features faster and more reliably.

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is an approach than helps teams focus on defining and delivering features with demonstrable business value. Teams using BDD think about requirements in terms of “executable specifications", a much more precise and collaborative approach to requirements analysis than more traditional methods.

This one-day workshop is an intensive introduction to fundamental Agile Requirements/BDD practices, a vital skill for anyone involved in software development today. It is aimed at cross-functional teams from all horizons, and will be equally useful to product owners, BAs, testers and developers.

Course outline

The topics covered during the workshop include:

• Principles of Agile Requirements Gathering
• From Business Value to Features
• Using Impact Mapping and Feature Injection to discover features with real business value
• Prioritising stories and planning releases using Story Mapping
• The art of writing Executable Specifications
• Defining good acceptance criteria
• Real Options and Deliberate Discovery
• Reporting on progress and status
• Functional Coverage - mapping acceptance tests to requirements
• Overview of BDD tools for different technologies
• Demonstration of real-world BDD practices and tools

BDD Development Practices Workshop (2 days)

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a cornerstone of good modern development practices. Good TDD practices can reduce defects by 90% or more, promote better design, make the code easier to understand, to change and cheaper to maintain. But it is hard to master without help.

This workshop will give your team a solid grounding in practical TDD/BDD, no matter what language they use or what background they come from. Students will learn how to write high-quality unit tests, or more precisely, "executable specifications", to write better designed, more maintainable and more reliable code. Students will also discover how BDD helps keep development focused on the real requirements, resulting in a higher quality product for the end user. Return on investment is immediate - these are skills that every developer needs to master.

This workshop teaches the principles of TDD and BDD, which are applicable in any modern programming environment. We discuss TDD/BDD tools for Java, .NET and JavaScript, and students have the option of doing the labs in the language of their choice, and even bringing their own laptops.

Course outline

• Principles of Agile Requirements Gathering
• Discovering and defining requirements, BDD-style
• Writing high-level executable specifications (JBehave, Cucumber, SpecFlow)
• Introducing Test Driven Development, BDD-style
• Unit tests as executable specifications
• Writing high quality unit tests (JUnit, NUnit, Spock, NSpec, Jasmine)
• Unit tests as living technical documentation
• Data-driven testing
• Interaction-based testing (mocks, stubs, doubles)
• London-style TDD: discovering system design using mocks
• Refactoring strategies
• TDD for legacy code

Automated Acceptance Testing with WebDriver and Thucydides (2 days)

Today's web applications are increasingly rich and sophisticated, and time-to-market pressure is ever increasing. Projects can no longer afford long manual testing cycles for each release. No modern web application project can hope to deliver reliably and rapidly without high quality automated web tests.

This intensive two-day workshop will teach you how to write solid, reliable, and maintainable automated web tests using the best-of-breed open source technologies like Selenium WebDriver and Thucydides. It will teach you how both testers and developers can collaborate to write more effective automated acceptance and regression tests. And you will learn how these automated tests can fit in to the overall development process to help speed up delivery and reduce both cost and time to market.

Course outline

• Introduction to automated web testing
• Types of automated web testing
• WebDriver fundamentals
• Identifying page elements
• The Page Objects pattern
• Working with AJAX
• Writing sustainable web tests
• Writing meaningful tests
• Structuring your web tests for reuse and ease of maintenance
• Organizing requirements with Thucydides
• Feature Coverage
• Requirements-level reporting
• Release-level reporting
• Integrating with external tools

Course locations and date

Date	Course	Location	Price	Book
1 Dec 2014	Advanced Agile Requirements Practices	Sydney	Early-Bird $800 Full Price $900
2-3 Dec 2014	BDD in Action Master class	Sydney	Early-Bird $1600 Full Price $1800
4-5 Dec 2014	Automated Web Testing with WebDriver and Thucydides	Sydney	Early-Bird $1600 Full Price $1800