Behavior-driven development

Provar supports a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) approach to creating test cases for automation. Provar has a number of BDD test steps as well as a BDD reporting feature.

BDD is useful for ensuring that your automation focuses on business needs while meeting all user requirements. It can also help business stakeholders to understand automated tests at a high level without going into technical detail.

Using these test steps, you can group together test steps based on their behavior to define pre-conditions, actions and checks respectively.

BDD Test Steps

Provar provides BDD test steps for Given, When, Then, And and But.

Given

The purpose of Given in BDD is to put your system in a ready state before an interaction or action.

In Provar, the Given test step is used to group the test steps in your test case which define a set of pre-conditions or data setup. For example, “User is on the Contact New Screen”:

When

The purpose of When in BDD is to describe the key actions that a user performs after the preconditions are met.

In Provar, the When test step is used to group the test steps in your test case which perform the actions. For example, “User completes the form and clicks Save”:

Then

The purpose of Then in BDD is to observe the outcomes of the interaction performed by the user.

In Provar the Then test step is used to group the test steps in your test case which carry the result assertions. For example, “Assert that a contact is created and the user is redirected to the contact view screen”.

And

The purpose of And in BDD is to combine two or more same type of action. And can be used with Given, When and Then.

But

The purpose of But in BDD is to create a condition statement. But can be used with Given, When and Then.

BDD reporting

You can also use Provar’s BDD Reporting feature to report on BDD test steps only.

To use this feature, open the Export Test Run dialog then select the BDD Report checkbox:

Click Finish.

The test report will be generated with only the BDD Test Steps showing:

Variable values in BDD reports

When a BDD test step is created with a variable, e.g. {NOW}, this variable will be resolved during the execution so that the actual value is shown in the Test Runner and in reporting.

In Test Runner:

In reporting:

BDD Reporting now includes sub-step screenshots

If you generate a report using the BDD Report option, Provar will include in the report any screenshots captured by test steps that are sub-steps of a BDD step, even if the test step themselves is not visible in the report.

For example, this test step includes screenshots and is a sub-step under a Given test step: