Last night I attended the
Dennis Dropin
event on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Drupal. This is a new event on the
Drupal London scene hosted by Dennis Publishing.

I've been attending Drupal events in London since 2007, and there have been
a wide variety of different types of events. There have been high points, such as
Drupal Camp London 2013,
and low points (we had quite a lot of Microsoft sponsored events, but one in particular
springs to mind where every presentation was also either paid for by Microsoft or
about Microsoft technology - I'm not complaining - I have no right to complain
as I've eaten enough of their free pizza over the years!). From
Drupal Camps, Drupalcon, code sprints, workshops, trainings, and just regular pub meetups,
London has a really exciting and active Drupal-scene.

Do we need another event?

Well, if this first event in the series is anything to go by I'd say
definitely, yes please!
The event took place in the boardroom at Dennis Publishing, so it was limited
in capacity, about 25 people in attendance and the room was nicely packed.
Paul Lomax, the CTO, did say that they had plans
for a bigger space so by July we could see this expand into a
bigger event.

I can think of at least three reasons why this event was a success:

• It really felt like this was Dennis Publishing wanting to give something back
  to the Drupal community. The two presentations were perfectly matched.
  The first to motivate reasons for adopting BDD, and the second to give practical examples.
  There was enough technical detail to be useful, without being overwhelming.
• Dennis' approach to digital is exemplary, probably due to Paul's leadership.
  It comes across that the whole team have the right balance of
  formal process and pragmatism.
• It seemed like a lot of the Dennis team were in attendance and the experience
  level of attendees was high. This meant there were some interesting discussions
  around the presentations too.

The event had a natural split in two parts, which I'd never really considered
before, but perhaps others planning events could take into account. Pairing a
presentation of motivating business cases with a more technical presentation of
practical examples and inner workings.

It was interesting to hear in the discussion alongside the presentations
real world cases of how BDD had caught bugs that would have cost them
ad revenue or resulted in financial losses if they had made it into production.

I asked about Continuous Deployment and if introducing testing and increased the frequency of deployment.
Paul confirmed they had been able to do more regular deployments, but gave
a good reason (one I hadn't thought of) for why Continuous Deployment is not
viable in a Drupal environment. His argument was that when you do a deployment
you have to do a cache clear, and when you do a cache clear you clear the form
cache. This kicks out any content editors that might be working on the site
so deployments have to be limited and controlled. This lead to some discussion
of a growl-like notification system with Node.js to push notifications to
content editors logged in to the site.

Another really interesting idea was the integration of visual diff into
the Behat tests. This allows them to do a pixel-by-pixel comparison between
the staging environment and production to flag up any major changes. A great
extra precaution to pick up any bugs that may cause blocks to disappear or
display incorrectly.

The next event in the series,
Responsive Web design: How Dennis are skinning this cat is scheduled for April 16th. Already 17 people
signed up to the Meetup group so I hope I get in!