BDD &TDD

paramtech.com.tr
©2024. Tüm hakları saklıdır.
What is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)?

What is BDD Testing?

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) testing is a software development approach that
focuses on the behavior of the system from the end user’s perspective. It emphasizes
collaboration among stakeholders, including developers, QA engineers, and business
analysts, to ensure that the software meets both business requirements and user
expectations.
What is Behavior-Driven Development Process (BDD)?

The script in BDD is written using a language called Gherkin, which employs simple phrases like
“Given,” “When,” and “Then” to outline the expected behavior of the software. For instance, a scenario
might be described as “Given a user is logged in, When they click on the ‘logout’ button, Then they
should be logged out and redirected to the login page.” These scripts are subsequently translated into
automated tests that verify if the software behaves as anticipated.

What makes BDD effective is its ability to align everyone involved in the project, ensuring they
comprehend and agree on the final outcome. This shared understanding reduces miscommunication
and discrepancies, leading to a higher likelihood of project success.
What is Behavior-Driven Development Process (BDD)?
1. Customer-driven product development
By considering customers’ feedback early and adopting the Agile methodology, behavior-driven
development ensures a highly efficient and customer-driven product that not only meets but exceeds
customer requirements.

2. Proper prioritization of features

Prioritization of product features plays a crucial role in software development. For instance, critical features of a music
streaming app are video/audio streaming quality, device compatibility, and user controls, to name a few.

Similarly, core features exist for every product that determines how effective the product will be in delivering what it
promises. In the behavior-driven development approach, one can emphasize core product features, prioritize them,
and segregate them as per requirements.

Features that offer more business-critical solutions can be implemented, tested, and delivered first. This also helps in
time, cost, and resource optimization while improving product quality.
3. Greater transparency

Transparency is the key to success for any product development approach, especially if a collaborative stance is taken.
Behavior-driven development ensures greater visibility of the system features so that all the developers, testers, business
stakeholders, and other team members can clearly understand what is being developed and whether the features can match the
specific set of requirements or not. As a result, greater transparency can be maintained during product development, and one
can avoid the chances of ambiguities or conflicts.
4. Reduced maintenance and project risk

For any product development, certain risks are involved, such as the chances of inefficient feature development,
product features failure, compatibility issues, redevelopment costs and time, and others. By opting for a
behavior-driven development approach, organizations can minimize the risks associated with software
development.

5. Better alignment with overall business goals

As this development approach emphasizes the behavior of each feature, details about what purpose they serve,
how well it fits in the current market, how it can drive more profits, etc., can be conveyed better. As a result,
developing a product that matches business criteria becomes easier.
1. Enhanced Collaboration: BDD promotes collaboration among business stakeholders, developers, and testers by using
a common language to describe requirements. This fosters better understanding and alignment among team
members.
2. Clearer Requirements: Writing scenarios in plain language using Gherkin syntax helps clarify requirements and
expectations. This reduces ambiguity and ensures that everyone has a shared understanding of the desired behavior.
3. Focus on User Behavior: BDD emphasizes the behavior of the system from the user’s perspective. By focusing on user
stories and scenarios, BDD ensures that development efforts are aligned with user needs and priorities.
4. Early Issue Detection: BDD encourages writing tests before implementation, allowing teams to identify potential
issues early in the development process. This leads to faster feedback loops and reduces the cost of fixing defects later
on.
5. Automated Testing: BDD scenarios can be automated using tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. Automated tests
provide fast and reliable feedback on the application’s behavior, enabling teams to detect regressions quickly and
ensure ongoing quality.

6. Improved Documentation: BDD scenarios serve as executable documentation for the system’s behavior. This
documentation remains up-to-date as tests are regularly executed, providing a living specification of the software.
Limitations
Limitations

● Initial Learning Curve: Adopting BDD requires teams to learn new frameworks, tools, and methodologies,
which can initially slow down the development process as team members familiarize themselves with the
new approach.
● Time-Consuming Process: Writing feature files, defining scenarios, and maintaining step definitions can be
time-consuming, especially for large and complex projects, leading to potential delays in delivery.
● Dependency on Stakeholder Involvement: BDD relies heavily on collaboration between stakeholders,
including business analysts, developers, testers, and product owners. Lack of active participation from stakeholders can hinder the effectiveness of BDD.

● Dependency on Stakeholder Involvement: BDD relies heavily on collaboration between stakeholders,

including business analysts, developers, testers, and product owners. Lack of active participation from
stakeholders can hinder the effectiveness of BDD.
● Difficulty in Complex Scenarios: BDD excels in capturing behavior for straightforward scenarios but may
struggle to handle highly complex scenarios or edge cases, leading to ambiguity or inefficiencies in test automation.
Limitations

● Maintenance Overhead: As the project evolves, maintaining and updating existing feature files and step
definitions to reflect changes in requirements or functionality can become challenging and
resource-intensive.
● Potential Over-Engineering: Without proper guidance and oversight, teams may over-engineer their BDD
tests, adding unnecessary complexity and reducing maintainability in the long run.
● Tooling Limitations: The effectiveness of BDD heavily depends on the availability and suitability of
supporting tools and frameworks. Limited tooling options or compatibility issues with existing systems can
hinder adoption and implementation.
Behavior-Driven Development Examples

Behavior-driven development can define the characteristics or behavior of each product

feature through relevant examples. Defining the features with examples takes place before
the development process and acts as the acceptance criteria. Here are a few examples of
how one can use behavior-driven development differently and with various tools,
frameworks, and syntaxes.
1. BDD with Gherkin syntax

The Gherkin syntax consists of a set of lines called steps and comes with an additional structure dedicated to
offering a simple learning curve even to non-technical persons and non-programmers. The rest and the central
part of the Gherkin syntax are in the form of plain text.

The main focus of the Gherkin syntax is not only to highlight the specific intention of an example and test but to
use an accurate description to portray fundamental business rules. Some of the most prominent examples of
behavior-driven development with Gherkin syntax are used with the following keywords:
● Feature: It is used to describe a software feature.
● Scenario: This denotes the behavior of the system. A scenario describes various patterns such as events,
required results, initial context, and others.
● Background: The background refers to the context and background of the system with a specific set of
features and solutions.
● Scenario Outline: The scenario outline implies the outline of the system behavior, especially in the case
of multiple scenarios.
● Examples: Examples denote various factors relevant to BDD, such as features, solutions, functionalities,
and others.
● Given, When, Then, and But (Steps): These denote various steps, conditions, and relations between
the steps.
● “”” (Doc Strings): Denotes strings of documents.
● | (Data Tables): Represents data stored in tables.
● @ (Tags): These refer to various elements of the behavior-driven development process.
● # (Comments): Comments convey essential and additional information relevant to behavior-driven
programming.
 2. BDD with Cucumber

Another prominent example of BDD can be seen with the testing framework CucumberOpens a new window
. Cucumber is a widely used testing framework that is written in Ruby. Being open-source and straightforward
to understand, Cucumber is used widely by developers and testers.

It supports behavior-driven development fully and lets you write diverse test cases easily. You can outline,
define, and document the behavior of an application in simple text, language, and syntax called Gherkin, as
discussed above.

One of the most significant advantages of implementing behavior-driven development with Cucumber is
that it can test code of behavior-driven development written in different languages such as Java, C#, and
Python, to name a few. Another perk of using Cucumber in behavior-driven development is that it supports
the collaborative approach taken in the BDD process.

For instance, if a higher number of teams and their respective opinions exist during behavior-driven
development, Cucumber is used. Furthermore, Cucumber acts as an all-in-one framework for test
automation, development aid, and behavior-driven development documentation.
3. BDD with SpecFlow

Another typical example of BDD is observed when it is used with SpecFlowOpens a new window , a prevalent
behavior-driven development framework for .NET. While several similarities between SpecFlow and Cucumber
exist, this is based on Ruby on Rails and hosted on GitHub.

It is also an open-source framework and not only caters to behavior-driven development and acceptance test
driver development, more commonly known as ATDD. Acceptance test driver development facilitates the
collaborative efforts of team members and mainly involves four phases:
 ● Discuss: This is the initial phase or the stage of the ATDD cycle where the initial discussion among stakeholders occurs.
● Distill: In this stage of the ATDD cycle, the Agile methodology is applied to implement testing automation and proper test
execution throughout the project.
● Develop: The development phase of the ATDD cycle works on a test first development or TFD approach, which implies that
the test is first run, then the bugs or issues are pointed out, and finally, the process is executed for faster and error-free
development.
● Demo: In this phase, the team provides a demo to the stakeholders to convey the tests run, the results, and issues or bugs
to be fixed, if any.
●
SpecFlow/Cucumber BDD test: Real-life example:

Here’s a glimpse of how the SpecFlow/Cucumber BDD test will look for an application or
system’s feature ‘Log In’.

Feature: Log In

Log in must be fast and user-friendly

Scenario: Successful Log In

User should get a pop-up message of ‘Signed In’ on screen

Given the user has chosen to sign up

When the user sign up with the valid credentials

Then they should receive a pop up message

Scenario: Invalid Credentials

When a user tries to log in using the credentials which don’t exist.

Scenario: Invalid Password

When a user puts invalid password

This helps visualize the whole system feature and its behavior under different conditions. It also aids the
collaborative approach taken in behavior-driven development as it is easily understandable by various
teams, businesses, and stakeholders.
What is Test-Driven Development?

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a methodology in software development that focuses on

an iterative development cycle where the emphasis is placed on writing test cases before
the actual feature or function is written. TDD utilizes repetition of short development cycles.
It combines building and testing. This process not only helps ensure correctness of the code
-- but also helps to indirectly evolve the design and architecture of the project at hand.
TDD usually follows the "Red-Green-Refactor"
cycle:
1. Add a test to the test suite
2. (Red) Run all the tests to ensure the new test
fails
3. (Green) Write just enough code to get that
single test to pass
4. Run all tests
5. (Refactor) Improve the initial code while
keeping the tests green
6. Repeat
This process sounds slow, and it often can be in the short-term, but it does improve the quality
of the software project in the long-run. Having adequate test coverage acts as a safeguard so
you don't accidentally change the functionality. It's much better to catch a bug locally from
your test suite than by a customer in production.

Finally, test suites can encapsulate the expectations of your software project so that your
project's stakeholders (peers, future self) can better understand the project.
Benefits

TDD encourages writing testable, loosely-coupled code that tends to be more modular.
Since well-structured, modular code is easier to write, debug, understand, maintain, and
reuse, TDD helps:
● Reduce costs
● Make refactoring and rewriting easier and faster ("make it work" with red and green
stages, then refactor "to make it right")
● Streamline project onboarding
● Prevent bugs and coupling
● Improve overall team collaboration
● Increase confidence that the code works as expected
● Improve code patterns
● Eliminate fear of change
 TDD also encourages constant reflection and improvement. This often exposes areas and abstractions in your
code that need to be rethought, which helps drive and improve the overall design.
Finally, by having an extensive test suite in place that covers nearly all possible paths, developers can get quick,
real-time feedback during development. This reduces overall stress, improves efficiency, and increases
productivity.
Why is it important to see a test fail?
It may seem odd, but it's just as important to see a test fail as it is to see a test pass in TDD.
Put simply, a failing test:
1. Validates that the new test is meaningful and unique, helping to ensure that the implemented code is not only
useful but necessary as well.
2. Provides an end goal, something for you to aim for. This focuses your thinking so that you write just enough code
to meet that goal.
Teşekkürler

paramtech.com.tr
©2024. Tüm hakları saklıdır.