At White Label Crowdfunding, we’re committed to helping create platforms that serve all our clients’ needs and limit their headaches. Part of that is making sure that even the parts of your site you never see work perfectly. Enter behat, or behavioral testing.
Behat is a testing process that makes it possible to test out the features of a website as if an actual user were going through the site to try different functionalities — but instead, an automated script saves loads of time and offers more accurate results.
“The goal is to reduce the number of issues being sent back after a site is live,” explains Development & Testing Manager Pawel Szewczyk. “Employing behat means that rather than having to test and apply hot fixes on the live site, then revisit development, then fix the site, we can deal with the causes of the problem in advance. That’s much more efficient than dealing with the consequences of a problem after the site is live.”
Behat is one tool of what is called Behavior Driven Development – or BDD. BDD means writing stories that describe a hypothetical human’s interaction with the site, e.g.: first they log in, then they see a welcome screen, and then they choose an option from a user menu. Behat is how developers can test the site to see if the site’s backend functionality makes it possible for that story to come true. The behat script will fail if the site does not allow the user — in this case the script — to follow the logic of the BDD test.
It uses what’s called cucumber syntax, which has the advantage of being a human readable format. Someone not familiar with coding can still read the test and see its logic, which makes it a friendly testing format for our clients to engage with.
Any time we make a change to your site — like adding new bidding functionality or better interfaces to allow users to get the information they need — we will use behat to make sure everything is ready to go before sending the change live.
Behavioral testing is just one of many tools we implement to make sure your site is efficient, user-friendly and successful. If you ever have questions about our development strategy, please contact us at hello@whitelabelcrowd.fund
