Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is first and foremost a collaboration practice.
It uses conversations about concrete examples and business rules to uncover uncertainty and ambiguity and better understand our customer needs.
Concrete examples are a great way to build a shared understanding of a requirement as people generally relate better to concrete examples than to abstract ideas.
Examples naturally lead to more counter-examples, maybe some questions, and this enables us to build our understanding of a problem and flesh out things we don’t know.
BDD also uses a business language, or common language, to help ensure everyone is on the same page and everyone understands what we’re trying to achieve.
While BDD is not a form of test automation or even a form of testing, we can use test automation to write automated accepted tests or as we call them executable specifications, that help us get faster feedback.
Collaboration and shared understanding are central to the BDD idea.
What we hope to achieve with Behavior-Driven Development is to:
- Bridge the communication gap between business developers, testers, and designers and their multiple perspectives
- Foster a shared understanding among the team members on what the customer needs are
- Enable faster feedback via automation
Contact us for a custom private workshop on Behavior-Driven Development and more Agile topics.
