Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Behaviour Driven Infrastructure

I just read a post by Matthew Flanagan on Behaviour Driven Infrastructure or BDI, a concept that apparently originates with Martin Englund's post on this topic. The idea is that you describe what you need your system to do in natural language, using for example a tool such as Cucumber. What's more, you can then use the cucumber-nagios plugin to express the desired behaviour of the new system as a series of Nagios checks. The checks will initiall fail (just like in a TDD or BDD development cycle), but you will make them pass by deploying the appropriate packages and applications to the system.

I also expressed the need for automated testing of production deployments in one of my blog posts. However, BDI goes one step further, by describing a test plan for production deployments in natural language. Pretty cool, and again I can only wish that the Python testing tools kept up with Ruby-based tools such as Cucumber and friends....

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is the first I've heard of Cucumber, which looks like a fantastic idea. Agreed that there needs to be something similar in the Python ecosystem... something else to add to the never ending list of things to play with :)

Matthew Flanagan said...

Hi Grig,

There is pycukes for us Pythonistas!

Matthew

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