Srikanth
A road to effective design and clean code is all about the Behaviour Driven Development. From the point of view of its stakeholders, BDD is all about implementing an application.
Let us walk through all about Behaviour Driven Development basics you need to know. Here are the below topics you’ll read about:
- What is Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
- Features of Behaviour Driven Development
- Three Practices of Behaviour Driven Development
- o Key Concepts of Behaviour Driven Development
- Advantages of Behaviour Driven Development
- Disadvantages of Behaviour Driven Development
- Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) vs Test Driven Development (TDD)
What is Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)?
Behaviour driven development is a software development process that encourages collaboration among quality assurance testers, customer representatives and developers in a software project.
Behaviour-driven development is a testing practice that follows the idea of specification as an example of Test Driven Development. The sole motive over here is to describe how the application should behave in a very simple business or the user based focused language.
Features of Behaviour Driven Development:
- Transferring from thinking in “tests” to thinking in “behaviour”
- Collaboration between the QA Team, Business Analysts, Developers and Business Stakeholders.
- An easy to describe language – Ubiquitous language.
- Driven by Business Values.
The Three Practices of Behaviour Driven Development:
The Behaviour Driven Development process moves through three phases – discovery, formulation and automation – where the acceptance criteria are transformed into acceptance tests that are automated.
The process begins in the discovery phase, where the Product Owner or Product Manager creates acceptance criteria, the same like a part of writing a story or feature. The discovery process is collective in nature, and identification and contribution of new criteria for the development process by the team members.
As a backlog item moves closer to implementation, the formulation phase solidifies acceptance criteria by creating acceptance tests. Initial acceptance criteria are often expressed with indefinite, general terms. The formulation phase resolves these puzzled behaviour by turning the scenarios into in depth acceptance tests that are specific, simple, clear and definite examples of behaviour.
The automation phase automates the acceptance tests, so they can run continuously without any hindrance in between and validate that the system always supports the new and enriching behaviour.
Key Concepts of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD):
- Identify business feature.
- Identify scenarios under the selected feature.
- Define steps for each scenario.
- Run feature and fail.
- Write code to make steps pass.
- Refactor code, Create reusable automation library.
- Run feature and pass.
- Generate test reports.
Advantages of Behaviour Driven Development:
- There’s less rework due to misinterpreted requirements as BDD allows the users to clearly communicate their requirements and acceptance criteria.
- User Needs are the most focused point.
- The BDD methodology allows user needs to be met through software development and indeed it builds a strong satisfactory users.
Disadvantages of Behaviour Driven Development:
The primary “disadvantages” of BDD are:
- Because communications is the major factor between the user and the developer, if the user if not available at that point during any emergency or hurdles, it will be difficult to work after the scenario that has taken place and questions generated by the user stories.
- The second disadvantage is the necessity to provide a team of developers to work with the client all time. The short response time required for the process means high levels of availability. However, if the client and his organization has a good understanding of the work what is involved in a development project based on Agile principles, the client expert will be available whenever it is required. And if the development teams perform as efficiently well and appropriate to their expectations, their demands on the client expert will be decrease..
Behaviour Driven Development vs Test Driven Development:
Here are quick differences between BDD vs TDD.
| CRITERIA | TDD | BDD |
| Team members involved | Developers | Product owners, business analysts, testers, developers |
| Implementation Level | Low-level | High-level |
| Development Stage | Coding, refactoring | Feature discussion, creating scenarios, testing, coding, refactoring |
| Key Stage | Test Writing | Discussing and creating scenarios |
| Language | Any programming language | Gherkin syntax for user stories and scenarios; any programming language for tests and code; an additional framework to connect Gherkin specification and automated tests implementation |
| Focus On | Defining required functionality with tests | Correspondence between implemented feature and expected behaviour. |
| Input documentation | Requirements documentation | Acceptance criteria, requirements documentation |
