As a tester you will often encounter environments that desire to practice some form of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and testing practices must fit within that. The term “BDD” may be used more or less vaguely. One thing that’s often somewhat common is that people will start to promote so-called “BDD tools.” Examples here would be tools like Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip, SpecFlow, Behat, Lettuce, and so forth. These tools all ask you to adhere to some sort of organization based on terms like “feature”, “story”, “scenario” and so on. What this often ends up doing is totally missing the point.

But what is the point?

In my post Are We Defocusing Our Development and Test Practices? I was talking about the various “driven-development” terms. I had brought up how Behavior Driven Development (BDD) seems to have largely come about because some people felt that the term “test” was a bit too confusing for some people or, at the very least, off putting for some reasons that are not explained very well. There was thus apparently a shift to “examples” that talked about “behavior” and this was somehow different than a test. And this somehow made everything a bit better. But did it? What was it about the terms “test” and “testing” that were just not working? I’d rather people deal with that problem before thinking we need to come up with new acronyms. I say that because, ultimately, the concepts of a “test” and the activity of “testing” is still very much there.

As a tester, you’ll hear about behavior-driven development (BDD). Sometimes this goes by acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) or maybe even acceptance test-driven planning (ATDP). You may hear that these are related to test-driven development (TDD). After a while you might start to wonder if these are just different ways of saying the exact same thing.