Using BDD at scale

Behavior driven development is a good practice for agile teams and is now widely adopted in many cutting edge software companies. BDD enhances collaboration between end users, business analysts, developers and testers.

Among these cutting edge companies, Parkeon has implemented Behavior Driven Development at scale on a very large project for the city of Helsinki: development of a ticketing system. This project required 4 years and hundred thousands of man days of development. The system is now in production and Parkeon's goal is to manage 1 million commuters per day and 6000 connected devices.

Why BDD ?

Parkeon did choose BDD first because it enhances collaboration: they wanted to get people work together from 6 different countries. Moreover, they needed a common business terminology and BDD was the opportunity to create a specific wording that everyone could understand easily.

Raphaël Citeau, the delivery manager of Parkeon explained that they were looking for “one method that can fit to all types of teams regardless the technology they are using.” In fact, they wanted to use a common framework while keeping teams habits.

By using BDD, Christophe Rondeau, project director of Parkeon, wanted to create a shared understanding between the customer and teams (what are they doing, why and when).

Process & tools

Concerning the process, Parkeon used the scrum with 2 weeks’ iterations. The following tool stack was implemented:

The test pyramid

At the functional level, the teams created 200 end-to-end tests, 940 system’s integration tests and 1635 functional tests.

These 3000+ functional tests were all automated and just based on 1700 steps thanks to Hiptest refactoring and autocomplete feature! This was definitely key to automate the tests at scale.

Outcomes

On time

Parkeon’s project was a great success. They were mostly no delay in any of the releases even if 10% of the features have been changed. The project was completed on time which is amazing for such a long project.

On budget

The initial budget for testing was respected and there were no additional charges.

Happy customer

Less than 3% of the features had bugs that were identified by the customer. The project is now live and used by 1 million commuters a day!

Download Parkeon's success story : Using Behavior Driven Development on a huge ticketing system

If you want to learn more about BDD, let’s discover our posts Getting Started with BDD (Part 1) & Getting Started with BDD (Part 2)

Enjoy BDD!