What is BDD?

Behavioral Driven Development is a method of breaking down customer requirements into discrete, real-life scenarios at the feature level. Simply put it is a way to use plain customer activities and expectations, known as customer requirements, to craft the feature set for a product. These customer requirements are then used to create the User Story and build in the scenario into the test plan or acceptance criteria of that story.

BDD starts with customer requirements often relayed to the team’s product owner. Then the product owner and the team have a discussion where they elaborate on the requirements and eventually define them in a structured format.

The most common of these structured formats is known as the Gherkin format that follows the prompts Given, When, Then.

Here is a simple example of BDD:

Customer Scenario:

“I want to be able to login to the website and see my account summary screen.”

Customer Requirement in Gherkin Format:

Given: that I am on the login screen

When: I attempt to login with valid credentials

Then: I am taken to my account summary screen

What’s the value?

This simplifies the testing because the customer requirement becomes the basis for the test script for the associated User Story. BDD also engages testing earlier in the process at the creation of the user story aligning development and testing directly with the customer requirement. The customer focus of BDD is the real heart of the value proposition. The customer scenario being written in plain language allows each team member to understand what the customer wants, why they want it, and any pain points along the way.

And… now you understand BDD!

Cheers,
Joe