Behavior Driven Development (BDD) – How to Deliver Sooner?

As Agile and DevOps initiatives integrate and come together to deliver the possible requirements, applying practices helps to solve the problem in particular. BDD helps to understand business needs in clear path from development to production.

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is an agile software development methodology that depicts the system’s behavior using examples to create a shared understanding between developers and business analysts with the aim of delivering products with business value. BDD focuses on what a system should do ensuring the software not only works as intended, but also meets and exceeds the customer’s expectations. BDD makes practices such as sprint planning and backlog grooming, user stories and acceptance criteria much more effective.

Business Driven Development promotes strong collaboration among the developers, testers, business analysts, and stakeholders to ensure they are all on the same page while resolving any differences in opinions that may arise.

Steps to perform Behavior-Driven Development

• A project starts with a conversation between the developers, managers, and stakeholders to gain insight into how the product should function
• The product’s expectations are set and tests are written in a simple ubiquitous language that is easy to understand and interpret by everyone involved in the project. No development skills and programming knowledge is required for creating tests
• The developers then work on developing a product conforming to these specifications
• The existing system behaviors are taken into consideration to see if the new features will break any of the existing features

Here is a simple example

In order to provide customer entry into our system

As a product owner

I want to have the ability to provide registration page

Based on the above example, it’s clear the business wants to have a registration page as high-level requirement. The above requirement, could be broken into multiple modules like create, validate, integrate and verify. Each one could be unique portion of BDD to achieve the complete product.

For development

Given the registration page to be created

And validation needs to get applied for each field

When registration page integrated with backend

Then verify user registration successful and entries captured

Acceptance scenarios

Scenario: Display message ‘Please enter email’ to the user who didn’t enter email during registration

Given I fill valid values to the registration page without title

When I submit the page

Then verify message ‘Please enter email’ displayed to the user

As interesting as Business Driven Development sounds, it may not be for everyone. If this method doesn’t work for you, then you can revert back to writing requirements the old fashioned way. But I would recommend that every software company at least give BDD a try before writing it off completely.