Daniel Terhorst-North
Daniel Terhorst-North will be speaking at our 2025 conference.
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Daniel Terhorst-North
Daniel Terhorst-North uses his deep technical and operational knowledge to help business and technology leaders to optimise their organisations. He puts people first and finds simple, pragmatic solutions to complex business and technical problems, often using lean and agile techniques.
With over thirty years of industry experience, Daniel is a frequent speaker at technology and business conferences worldwide. The originator of Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) and Deliberate Discovery, Daniel has published feature articles in numerous software and business publications, and contributed to The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends and 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts. He occasionally blogs at dannorth.net/blog.
Sessions in 2025
20 years of BDD
Porter Tun - 09.15
Twenty years ago, I had a problem. I was working as a consultant introducing teams to ideas like continuous integration, pair-programming, and test-driven development. I was, and still am, a fan of TDD, and I was frustrated with how hard it was to get people to even try it. Most of the objections stemmed from the word ‘test’.
I tried changing my approach, using language like ‘code example’ and ‘executable spec’, and not mentioning tests at all, and that seemed to land better. People were certainly more willing to give it a try!
Fast-forward 20 years and I am amazed at the traction BDD has had. It has spawned a host of books, most of them fantastic, none of them by me. It gave rise to an ecosystem of automation tools starting in the Java and Ruby worlds as JBehave and RSpec respectively, and then exploding into the Gherkin-based tools of Cucumber, Reqnroll (née SpecFlow), and PHP’s own venerable behat.
Since PHPUK is also 20 years old this year—happy birthday!—it seems appropriate to look back over two decades of BDD to see how far we have come, what might be coming next, and why I think Cucumber-like tools are overkill for almost any use case (but fantastic when they aren’t).