DEVOPSdigest

Tricentis acquired SpecFlow, a BDD solution for .NET developers around the world.

SpecFlow’s pragmatic approach to specification-by-example has helped agile development teams improve collaboration with business stakeholders to build and deliver higher quality software.

SpecFlow will continue to remain a free, open source offering for the software development and testing communities.

SpecFlow+, SpecFlow’s commercial offering, and SpecMap, an Azure DevOps extension for user story mapping, will now be offered for free to meet the needs of scaling BDD across the enterprise – all backed by Tricentis’ leading innovation in continuous testing.

With this acquisition, Tricentis continues to extend its offerings in the open source and developer-led testing market. SpecFlow is Tricentis’ second acquisition in this market within the past year, with further acquisitions planned in the coming months. In 2019, Tricentis acquired TestProject, a free, cloud based test automation platform leveraging Selenium and Appium. The acquisition of SpecFlow adds best-in-class support for BDD and .NET developers to round out Tricentis’ comprehensive open source testing platform.

“BDD is becoming broadly relevant in enterprises for their digital transformation,” explained Tricentis Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Wolfgang Platz. “As business requirements change at DevOps speed, teams need a way to document how their applications should behave across highly integrated systems. Without built-in test automation to this shared understanding, software delivery leads to production bugs and poor user experiences. SpecFlow’s ability to create this shared business understanding, connected with automated tests, makes it the most trusted BDD platform for .NET development.”

SpecFlow was developed by TechTalk as the open source port of Cucumber for .NET in 2009. Since then, SpecFlow has gathered a massive open source community, with more than 9.6 million downloads and a user base that continues to grow at more than 3,000 downloads per day.

SpecFlow provides a way to define, manage and automatically execute human-readable acceptance tests in .NET projects. By using human-readable syntax, known as Gherkin (“Given-When-Then”), SpecFlow helps software delivery teams to create a common business understanding of how their systems should behave. Its integration with popular developer tools like Selenium and Microsoft Visual Studio have made SpecFlow the BDD standard to bridge the communication gap between developers, testers and business users.