Keeping Business Stay Relevant With BDD

Vadeesh Budramane, SVP IT, Sutherland

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Customer Experience has become the key driver for businesses and new strategies are constant­ly evolving to enhance the cus­tomer experience. Associated with this is the intense need to create & deploy innovative software quickly at the least cost – software that delivers in­cremental yet visible business value. DevOPs is thus becoming core to IT organizations, to allow for dynamics changes to be released to production in shorter cycles, securely and reliably, through automation of processes; it extends agility from software developments to operations. It establishes a perfect balance between two competing priorities - innovation in software development and consistency in the way services are delivered thus elimi­nating waste and improving efficiency. It binds people to­gether and makes development & operational team work seamlessly with no one throwing things across the fence. With agility and lean processes at its core, and with every incremental change being released in shorter cycles, it helps team to hypothesize, and validate or invalidate the same in shorter cycles. Should the hypothesis be invalidated then the experience serves as improvement opportunity. Thus, it fosters an environment for growth.

“It’s no more about freezing the requirements upfront but about flexibility to adapt to changing priorities”

Behaviour Driven Development

To get there, IT organizations must go for transformation for Agility - for Continuous Integration and more importantly, Continu­ous Delivery (CI/CD). Also, you need people who are techno-functional - functional SMEs who can optimize processes, teams who are well versed with Behaviour Driven Develop­ment (BDD), developers who can write pro­duction grade code the first time itself. The skill requirement is more and more techno-functional as one is expected to drive business outcomes. On top of these one needs people with stable power and flexibility to adapt the changing situations. Also one will need people who de­pend on their ability to influence others. It’s no more about freezing the requirements upfront but about flexibility to adapt to changing priorities.

Technical aspects of Behaviour Driven Development

From a technical perspective, robotics process automation, cognitive computing, machine learning & artificial intel­ligence form the foundation skills. That said, the require­ment itself is not in the normative range; it’s not about technical skills alone but about domain and process as well. For example, Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is not a technical skill and it cannot be attached to a tool. So, it calls for greater focus on selection process and even more focus on re-skilling, continuous learning & development. One also needs to draw parallels between existing skills and how they could be scaled for future. For example, un­derlying approach is the same for GUI test automation and robotic process automation for data entry. There needs to be a constant focus on assessment of skills against require­ment and bench-marking.

This requires budget and it's worth the investment keeping business stay relevant and will see happier custom­er and satisfied employees.

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