How BDD makes Software Development a Conversation

Imagine building software where everyone's on the same page. That's the power of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).

What is BDD?

Think of BDD as a shared language for developers, testers, and stakeholders. It focuses on how the software should behave from the user's perspective. Instead of technical jargon, BDD uses plain English scenarios to describe features. These scenarios, often written collaboratively, outline:

Who: The user interacting with the system (e.g., a customer)
What: The action the user takes (e.g., placing an order)
Then: The expected outcome (e.g., order confirmation)

Benefits of BDD

• Improved communication : BDD fosters clear understanding between technical and non-technical teams.
• Early bug detection : Scenarios act as living documentation, catching issues early in the development cycle.
• Increased stakeholder buy-in : Stakeholders see their needs reflected in the scenarios, leading to better alignment.

When BDD is suitable to apply

1. Complex Projects with Multiple Stakeholders : BDD is ideal for complex projects where requirements come from multiple stakeholders. By using plain language to define behaviors, BDD ensures that all parties have a clear and shared understanding of what the software should do.

2. Projects Requiring Strong Collaboration : BDD fosters collaboration between developers, testers, and business analysts. If your project requires close communication and teamwork among these roles, BDD can help align everyone's understanding and expectations.

3. Ensuring Requirements Are Well Understood : BDD helps in capturing requirements as user stories and acceptance criteria. If your project suffers from unclear or misunderstood requirements, BDD can provide a clear and concise way to document and verify them.

4. Test-Driven Development (TDD) Practices : For teams already practicing TDD, BDD can be a natural extension. It combines the rigor of TDD with the clarity of behavior specifications, ensuring that tests are closely aligned with business requirements.

5. Frequent Changes in Requirements : Projects that experience frequent changes in requirements can benefit from BDD. The Gherkin syntax used in BDD makes it easy to update scenarios to reflect new requirements, ensuring that the documentation and tests remain current.

BDD also can be applicable for scenarios like where End-to-End testing is required or Non-technical Stakeholders are in the project.

Getting Started with BDD

Start simple! Use tools like Gherkin, a popular BDD language, to write your scenarios. Many frameworks integrate seamlessly with BDD practices. By adopting BDD, you're creating a collaborative environment where everyone speaks the same language. This leads to higher quality software, happier stakeholders, and a more efficient development process.

Simple overview of Gherkin

Gherkin syntax is a domain-specific language for writing human-readable specifications that can be understood by non-technical stakeholders and used as executable test scripts. It is part of the Cucumber framework, which supports behavior-driven development (BDD).

Here is a simple example of a login scenario. Gherkin is written in understandable language so that everyone interacting with the project can easily dive into the details.

Feature: User login

  Scenario: Successful login
    Given the user is on the login page
    When the user enters valid credentials
    And the user clicks the login button
    Then the user should be redirected to the dashboard

  Scenario: Unsuccessful login
    Given the user is on the login page
    When the user enters invalid credentials
    And the user clicks the login button
    Then the user should see an error message

Top BDD tools

When talking about tests, there are scenarios that are a way of explaining how a given feature should behave with different input parameters or in different situations. When talking about feature files, basically, these are the text files. The extension of these types of files is .feature. These types of files are opened by any text editor and can also be readable by any Behavior Driven Development Tool like:

• Cucumber
• JBehave
• Behat