What is Behaviour Driven Development?
Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is similar to Test Driven Development. In BDD, B represents the behavior of the software developed. Like Test Driven Development, in Behaviour Driven Development also, the code is first written in a behavior-driven way, and further production code is written. But the main difference between Behaviour Driven Development and Test Driven Development is that in BDD, the test is written in understandable descriptive English-type grammar.
A process which is used for increasing the quality of a software or a product and for improving it by identifying defects, problems, and errors. Click to explore about, Test Driven Development with React JS
Why is Behaviour Driven Development important?
All over, BDD is related to the essential features of the product, the impacts of these features, and solutions (what can be done to deliver these features). BDD helps in securing the extra efforts and reduces the wastage of time and resources, too, and also helps prioritize what is essential. BDD works on the following step for effective product development -
- Requirements/Business goals.
- Impact/consequences of these goals.
- The solution to recovering the impacts.
What is a feature file?
As already discussed previously, that feature file should be of feature extension, which contains at least one scene of the particular feature, and as already previously discussed that scenarios are some determinable business situations defined regarding the Given-When-Then formula.
- Given some initial conditions.
- Event Occurrence
- Then some expected outcome is achieved.
TDD is nothing but the development of tests before adding a feature in code. Click to explore about, TDD, Behavior Driven Development and Unit Testing in Python
How does Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) Work?
Firstly the BDD process starts with a conversation between the product owner and users, actually what they need. Further, the product owner, developer, and tester collaborated and understood the requirements, and based on these requirements, they defined the structure scenarios. Then also, based on these scenarios, the developer developed the tests, and the tester uses these scenarios as the basis for their experiments.
BDD is an improvement of The Three Amigos. These three amigos are the primary views to examine an increment of work -
- Before development
- During development
- After development
Those views are -
- Business - What type of problem trying to solve?
- Development - How to build a solution for a particular problem.
- Testing - What about this, what could happen?
BDD based on the Given-When-Then formula is used as a guide for writing the acceptance tests.
- Given
- When
- Then
Where "Given" is any type of initial condition, "When" represents the occurrence of event/events, and "Then" represents the expected outcome.
Best practices of Behaviour Driven Development
- Convert requirements into user stories.
- Implement valid user scenarios rather than the creation of test cases.
- Implement the specification behavior of a class rather than the unit test of a class.
- Follow approach of "Given When Then" involving a set of pre-conditions, event occurrence, and achievement of outcomes.
A software development process which includes test-first development. Click to explore about, Database Unit Testing and Test-Driven Database Development
How to adopt a Behaviour Driven Development approach?
- Library creation containing one or more tests and test steps and/or test scenarios referenced by the step definitions.
- Map behaviors in the feature file to the test steps.
- Behavior Driven Development scenario executed, the test steps from the workspace into a new test to define the scenario.
- Module executes the scenario via the automation tool. The results also reported back to the Behaviour Driven Development tool.
Benefits of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
The benefits of Behaviour Driven Development are defined below:
- Clarity - In TDD, there were test cases, but in the case of BDD, termed as scenarios. The focus of each situation is on the appropriate behaviors of the product. The behaviors in each scenario are defined in simple, understandable language, and further, if there is any conflict or confusion in it, then it can be cleared with a simple conversation.
- Strong Collaboration - BDD is collaborative. BDD involves the contribution of everyone, from the customer to the tester. And anyone can write behavior scenarios written in plain language.
- Communication - As BDD uses plain language, it is understandable by all, from customer to tester, which leads to better communication and understanding between each other. And this also increases teamwork capability.
- Business Value - BDD gives importance to business values and needs. Because BDD gives priority to client requirements and further based on these requirements, also, the developer can provide efficient and better results because the developer has a strong understanding of how the client thinks.
Software testing plays an important role in the life cycle of software development. Click to explore about, Test Driven Development for Java
Top Behaviour Driven Development(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 Behaviour Driven Development Tool like
Conclusion
The primary benefit of Behaviour Driven Development is that it can easily be understood by a non-technical person also. BDD implemented on those behaviors only related to the business outcomes and too helpful in avoiding the wastage of time and resources. Basically, in BDD, the behavior is described in a single notation, which increases communication and is directly understandable by domain experts, testers, and developers. BDD is much more focused on collaborating with business people, and on the other hand, TDD seems to be too technical.
- Discover more about Test Driven Development for Java
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