Case Study: Austal reduces delivery costs and improves feedback loops with Mechanical Rock's BDD training

Austal Shift left with behaviour driven development

Austal, an Australian shipbuilder and defence contractor, faced challenges with its MARINELINK-Smart software, where miscommunication and late-discovered problems in a complex domain were leading to costly rework. To reduce the exponential cost of change, they engaged vendor Mechanical Rock for a two-day Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) Kickstart training course.

Mechanical Rock's solution empowered the Austal team to use BDD and example mapping to shift learnings left in the development process. This approach led to a 7x reduction in requirements elaboration time, saving over two weeks, and improved feedback loops by 2000x, allowing the team to disprove hypotheses in minutes without writing code.

Austal

Brian Foody

Lead Engineer