For quite some time there have been talks on using BDD in order to have:
- Better collaboration between Business Analysts (BAs), developers and testers.
- A common domain language for functional testing and for defining functional acceptance criteria, which everybody in the team understands.
Why BDD?
BDD offers following advantages:
- Ability to write test cases (scenarios) and acceptance criteria before performing any development. This whole idea is termed as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD).
- Provides a common domain language, which everybody across the board (developer, tester, BA and business) understands. As at the end it’s plain English, it’s simplest to learn compared to other DSLs (domain specific languages).BDD example
- Helps in eliminating waste by minimizing handshakes. If you take a look at the above-mentioned example, testers and BAs can write a test or acceptance scenario using a BDD template (highlighted in Yellow) with plane English
Developer/tester can then fill in the blanks, i.e. implement the test case using programming language or script.
Writing text doesn’t require any IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse. The test/acceptance scenario can be written in a Notepad too and then pushed to Version Control System, which is then picked up by developers/testers to implement.
As BAs, developers and testers work only one single source of truth (BDD test), it minimizes the handshakes and reduces waste. Also it is well understood by everyone as test-scenario is in plain English.
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