Looking into a team’s experience with adopting Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and at answering these questions: - Why did we try it? - What tools and processes did we adopt? - How did it go?

1. Behavior-Driven Development
One Team’s Exploration

2. Behavior-Driven Development
Or…
● BDD
● Acceptance Test-Driven Development
● Specification by Example
● ...

3. What is BDD?
● Focuses on specifying behavior instead of
writing tests
● Defines a language for writing behaviors that
can be executed
o Gherkin - Given-When-Then statements

4. Why use BDD?
● functional, end-to-end testing
● communication
o with product owner
o with team members
● documentation
● building the right software

5. What’s wrong with TDD?
● Nothing
● Reading unit-tests harder for the business

6. What tools & processes did we use?
We were building a REST service with Java,
so…cucumber-jvm with groovy.
● simplified step-definition (vs Java)
Given(~'^an order with all details$') {->
@Given("^a vehicle exists$")
public void a_vehicle_exists() throws Throwable {

7. What tools & processes did we use?
● groovy - cucumber-spring integration
o wasn’t strong, but can be worked around
● Could’ve used unit testing directly
Scenario: place a valid order
Given an order with all details
When an order is placed
Then a "CREATED" response is returned
And the location of the new order is returned
And a confirmation number is returned
And the status is "ACTIVE"
def “place a valid order”() {
given: “an order with all details”
when: “an order is placed”
then: “a CREATED response is returned”
and: “the location of the new order is returned”
and: “a confirmation number is returned”
and: “the status is ACTIVE”
}

8. How did it go?

9. Better Team Communication

10. Less Assumptions
Clarified assumptions with the Given clauses

11. Reviews and Unit Testing
Code review focus
● Read tests first
Unit test changes
● Used the Spock given-when-then structure, often with
comments, to explain the test similar to Cucumber.

12. Product Owner Involvement
Product Owner never ended up looking at the
tests

13. Story Breakdown
Difficulty with scrum story
breakdown and swarming
● Starting with Cucumber
feature left us feeling
constrained with how the next
steps would happen.
● How to get more than two
people on it and still feel
effective?

14. Others
More time consuming
Not everyone likes it

15. What would I do differently?
● Continue working on
involving product owner
● Create feature statements as part of story
creation
● Demonstrate progress through test report

16. Summary
● BDD was a good thing
● I think we should continue the practice
o though stronger business involvement is needed for
it to be truly effective

17. Questions