Our most requested feature for Behave Pro is “Publishing test reports” and today we have given early access to something that is a few steps beyond that, Living Documentation.
If you think back to days of 100-page word documents full of requirements, any time you had a question about the requirements you would have a conversation with the Business Analyst to get clarification or decision on a deviation. Often the result of this conversation would not be added to the original word document and it’s now become out of sync and has no value. It’s not just the fact it has no value, it can be dangerous as documentation because people within the project or team now have a differing understanding and no one knows what is ‘true’.
This is just one example of why “Working software over exhaustive documentation” made it into the agile manifesto.
Imagine if documentation was automatically generated and not curated by humans, you could eliminate the out of date issue that documentation typically faces. This is what teams practicing BDD can achieve when they write clear and easy to understand examples/scenarios, store it in source control and combine it with Test Automation using Cucumber or SpecFlow.
The scenarios are natural language, well written and easy to read by any team member, which means it’s useful documentation, particularly as it describes how the system or application behaves. But what makes it “living documentation” is the fact it’s generated from the Test Automation results from every CI build or deployment. It’s the Test Automation with Cucumber or SpecFlow that confirms if the system or application conforms to what is written down in the scenarios.
Getting to the stage of creating living documentation and giving people access to it is powerful. It’s not just the product and development teams that can benefit from it, it could be shared with support teams, operations, auditors (we see this a lot in regulated industries) and even in some cases end users.
As of today, you can publish test results from Cucumber Java, Cucumber JS and Cucumber Ruby to Behave Pro for create Living Documentation on your user stories in Jira. In the coming weeks, you will see Living Documentation arrive on the requirements page.
To get early access, request a demo today by contacting us using the Live Chat function on our website, or sign up for an evaluation on our marketplace listing.
