In no time, the term 'Manual QA" is going to be a dinosaur. What does that mean? Are all the Manual QA going to extinct? Thank Behat, Manual testers can have a bright career into Automation. The term automation is itself horrifying, which means complex framework, complex setup and the biggest of all, lots and lots of coding involved.

Behat is an open source BDD PHP framework. It has a rich library of extensions which will help you test user workflow and interact with the Web application using Mink, test your APIs and also develop a Page Object Automation framework.

Do you want to deliver a well-tested website, covering all the test scenarios in every iteration? Excellent, then what is the problem? Oh, too much of manual effort in executing the regression test cases. Well, then automate it. Now, what? Automation, huh, it needs a lot of coding, too much of investment. OK, enough reasons given, the list can go on.

Get started right on with automating your test scenarios with minimal code is what all Behat is about. Behat proved to be extremely useful to me in order to enter the world of automation. After understanding the architecture and its correct usage, my team and me could automate around 70% of the test cases by writing no/minimal PHP code. The lovely features provided by Selenium Webdriver can be easily integrated into Behat with the help of Selenium2Driver which comes out of the box. It is an automation testing framework, coupled with rich libraries in the form of extensions to enable users automate their acceptance tests, API tests and even create a Page Object model when needed. You can execute tests on various browsers or even headless browsers like phantomJS and headless Chrome for faster execution.

Since Behat is built on the lines of Cucumber and promotes BDD, it has proved to be an extremely useful tool to ensure that were are first building the right system followed by the system is being built right. With the help of human readable scenarios written in the feature files, the automation system can be understood by all the three parties - Business people, developers and testers. Gherkin language enables the tester to build more and more strong and a rich Automation test suite than trying to get the code right. composer.json and behat.yml files enable the user to configure stuff in no time.

There is nothing ‘Agile’ in the current distributed Agile project management systems, which is focused towards passively capturing and providing information to teams, they are traditionally designed for people who have no choice but to use, which are ‘transaction oriented than ‘relationship oriented’ this is really ‘anti Agile’.

This discussion / talk is inspired by Geoffrey Moore concept of systems of engagement . This discussion / talk is intended to

a)      Provoke thought on how to bring ‘Agile’ values and principle in transitioning from current Agile project management system designed around discrete pieces of information ("records") to systems which are more decentralized, & relationship oriented which embraces social behavior of a team.

b)    Talk also brings out following uniqueness of Systems of engagement and how can we achieve it in distributed Agile context