Skip to main content

Benefits of using BDD

For those that aren't aware, BDD stands for Behaviour Driven Development. It is a style of writing (often) acceptance tests, in a Given, When Then format. I've spoke about them in previous blog posts.

People often say what are the benefits of them? Why not just write normal tests?

Firstly, I feel that BDD isn't just useful as an automation framework, but more of a method of documenting the system that is under test. The Feature files become the documentation, and the great thing is, if the system changes, then the feature files need to be kept up to date to ensure they still pass! Documentation that is always kept up to date sounds too good to be true right!? Not with BDD!!! It provides a living specification of the software under test.

Secondly, BDD is a method of getting teams to discuss Acceptance Criteria, and ensuring that teams fully understand the business requirements up front, and it's a great enabler for Acceptance Test Driven Development.

Related to the above, using BDD ensures a common language is adopted for discussing new features and removes a lot of the ambiguity that can sometimes creep into User Stories or PBIs.

So there you have it, what I see as the main benefits of BDD. I'm a big advocator of it, having used it for over a year now, I can safely say it is a great method of creating living documentation and encouraging conversations between relevant parties with the goal of producing quality software.

Comments

  1. Can u teach, how to get started, where in there is no previous BDD at workplace.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testers: Be more like a Super-Villain!

Who doesn't love a Super Hero? Talk to my son, and he'll tell you how much he loves them, talk to many adults and they'll say the same! Deep down, we all love to be the Super Hero, we all want to save the day! However, I want to talk about the flip side of Super Heroes, the Super Villains... I often play Imaginext with my son, and I (unfortunately?) am nearly always the Super Villain! Be it Lex Luthor, Joker, Two Face, Mr Freeze or The Riddler! These are all great characters and great Super Villains, but why would I want to write about Super Villains? A while ago where I worked, we had a few Super Heroes, people who would be able to come in and "fix" things that had broken and help deliver projects on time. We then shifted, we decided to do away with the Super Hero culture and try and prevent from being in that position in the first place, whilst we didn't go as far as wanting to hire Super Villains, it's definitely a story that has stuck with me and t...

QA is Awesome!

No real point to this post other than I have had the song stuck in my head and figured I could change it slightly and quite easily make QA is Awesome! Oh and I haven't even seen the movie all the way through! But for some reason that song is incredibly catchy! Not much point to this post in fact, just thought I'd put it out there :)

What we (Asos Testers) are working towards this year...

At Asos we have a large testing team (30+ testers), they all work within their development teams, and the way development teams work can vary and understandably so. Helping the 30+ testers we have a number of Test Leads, of which I am one, recently we (the leads) all got together to come up with a plan of things that we feel we need to work on/define/have an idea of how to approach them for the next year to help improve our testing standards across the boards and improve the skillset of testers within the teams. To help with this we got together and came up with a mindmap, the plan going forward is for us to take ownership of one of the areas and come up with a strategy/approach/implement actions to help improve the areas and define whatever is needed. There's a lot there, and I'll probably write seperately about each one, and what we're doing, as it's always good to share ideas and get feedback... so watch this space!