ALM Octane Enables Enterprise BDD

Before we start with this post, check out this article Enterprise BDD? What does it mean? to have a better and complete understanding on the challenges enterprises are facing by scaling the BDD culture to the whole oganization.

ALM Octane was build to reduce the cost of translation while transforming towards DevOps. The task of the agile teams is to build high quality products and not to fix environment and traceability issues. With ALM Octane all different teams with their tool islands can be integrated seemlessly and avoid any kind of media breaches.

Use the tool of your choice within the teams to implement BDD – ALM Octane will take care about scaling it to your whole enterprise.

The workflow between the teams is defined within ALM Octane, also as ALM Octane will be the single source of truth, it is important to follow the workflow as defined below to gain the maximum of pace in the collaboration within your agile teams.

Practicing BDD culture, you will find the 3 main roles with business, developer and tester, also known as "3 Amigos of BDD". Within ALM Octane the kick start is initiated by the business representative such as product owner.

• The product owner starts with the definition of an user story in ALM Octane.
• The tester will add a gherkin test as acceptance criteria to the user story

Already in the beginning ALM Octane takes care about the traceability between the artefacts of BDD. As the acceptance criteria has been added to the user story as a gherkin test, it is displayed in the relation tab of ALM Octane.

Once the gherkin test as acceptance criteria has been added to the backlog i.e. user story,

• the developer can start design and develop the code of the feature based on the user story and gherkin test. The developer can use the IDE plugin for IntelliJ, Eclipse and Visual Studio to connect directly from his workspace to ALM Octane and see "MY WORK" module embedded. The "MY WORK" module will show to the developer only tasks, backlog items and tests which are relevant and assigned to him.
• the tester can start automate all scenarios using the BDD framework such as Cucumber or specflow. The tester can use the IDE plugin for IntelliJ, Eclipse and Visual Studio to connect directly from his workspace to ALM Octane and see "MY WORK" module embedded. The "MY WORK" module will show to the tester only tasks, backlog items and tests which are relevant and assigned to him. Tester can automate test cases using Cucumber, SpecFlow, UFTPro (LeanFT), Selenium, Appium, etc. - relatively choice of freedom here.
• both roles works in parallel on their areas.

Once both have finished their work, the feature can be verified and validated through the automated tests created by the tester.

Their are different way to kick start the build pipeline of an application once ALM Octane is integrated,

• either you start it directly from ALM Octane
• or by commiting the code by the developer
• or directly through the continuous integration (CI) server such as Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, GoCD and/or TFS.

Once the CI execution is completed, product owner can see on his dashboard,

• the coverage of features by ranking,
• how many acceptance criterias (gherkin tests) are passed,
• how many user stories are implmented in the current build,
• whats the number of failures and defects,
• etc.

Using Enterprise BDD with ALM Octane - thats how easily the BDD culture can be practiced to increase the pace of delivery by closing all gaps between the roles & provide visibility on current activities which need to be addressed.

Enterprise Features of ALM Octane to Scale BDD to an Organization

Some awesome enterprise capabilities of ALM Octane to even accelerate the collaboration between the roles in a BDD culture of an organization.

1 - MY WORK Module

The MY WORK module provides every user only a view on all artefacts assigned or owned by him / her. This feature is very important for the 3 Amigos as everyone knows the scope and work each individual has to deliver part of a sprint.

• Receive notifications for items that you are following and whenever you are mentioned in a comment.
• Track and update your assigned work with a personalized to-do list of work items.
• Add comments to any ALM Octane item for additional discussion.

2 - WORKFLOW DEFINITION

Use ALM Octane's workspace settings to define the workflow for your BDD project by

• defining phases,
• defining transition from phase to phase,
• designing new forms for end users to provide the information which is relevant for the transition phase of your workflow,
• show or hide fields based on the workflow,
• add list items to the fields.

3 - Reporting, Analytics and Insights

ALM Octane provides a very powerful engine of reporting accross all artefacts relevant during a BDD sprint. Its powerful integration capabilities enable machine learning of continuous integration systems, which provides insights & analytics of each delivered pipeline build.

4 - Visibility accross feature, backlog and test coverage

The Backlog and Team Backlog module help to manage product development, rank development items, and plan development cycles as well as show which backlog items are already covered and which need more attention.

5 - Code Coverage Analysis

To enable frequent releases with minimal disruption and maximum quality, it is best to regularly run automated tests that cover as much of your code as possible. Code coverage on pipeline runs measures the percentage of lines in your code that was called during a particular run of the pipeline.

ALM Octane combines the information from all of the code coverage reports in your pipeline run and shows you a unified picture. Pipelines display widgets that show code coverage per package and per file, as well as code coverage trends over time. Using this information, you can track how much of your code is covered by automated tests.

For more information on this cool feature: ALM Octane Cool Feature

6 - Check out many more features supporting enterprises to scale BDD.

Official ALM Octane Onlinehelp site: https://admhelp.microfocus.com/octane/

ALM Octane Free Trial (90 Days): https://software.microfocus.com/en-us/products/alm-octane/free-trial

Enjoy!