{"id":10988,"date":"2019-01-28T21:33:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T21:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/?p=10988"},"modified":"2025-05-05T21:23:28","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T21:23:28","slug":"what-is-bdd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abstracta.us\/blog\/testing-strategy\/what-is-bdd\/","title":{"rendered":"What is BDD and What Does it Mean for Testers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A development strategy that makes sense for both your business team and tech team<\/span><\/h1>\n

Behavior Driven Development (BDD), as its name indicates, is not a testing technique, but rather a development strategy (as well as TDD, which is test driven development). What it proposes is to define a common language for the business and the technical team members, using it at the outset of development and testing, hence why it\u2019s important for testers to understand BDD.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>BDD and TDD<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

I used to think about BDD as an evolution of TDD, but then I realized that it is much more than a simple evolution. It\u2019s a different approach that solves a different problem. In TDD, the focus is on the unit test, while in BDD, the focus is testing on a higher level, functional and acceptance testing, as its aim is to <\/span>comply with the business and not just with the code.<\/b><\/p>\n

Both approaches may coexist since an acceptance test could be specified and then refined into unit tests when coding that functionality in the different layers. Perhaps a clear advantage of BDD is that the developers focus on understanding the functionality and how it works at a business level.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>BDD in Agile Methodologies<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

This strategy fits well in the agile methodologies since, generally, requirements are defined as user stories. These user stories must have their acceptance criteria which are used to define acceptance tests, that can be written directly in a specific language called Gherkin.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>A Common Language for Business and Tech: Gherkin<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Gherkin is a very simple language, which can be written by someone who does not have a programming background, but at the same time, it can be understood by a computer program, in order to use it as a test specification.<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically, these tests will be stored in “.feature” files, which should be versioned together with the source code of the system being tested. Here\u2019s a <\/span>simple example taken from Cucumber<\/span><\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Gherkin<\/p>\n

These files specify:<\/span><\/p>\n