What is Behavior Driven Development (BDD)?

Key Takeaways

• Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a development process that prioritizes collaboration between technical and non-technical teams.
• Using BDD, test cases are written in natural language and take into account your business goals and user functionality. LoadView can be a helpful tool in the BDD development toolkit because it offers an accessible platform with reports that both technical and non-technical users can quickly understand.

Developers are an integral part of getting a website, app, or API off the ground, but they aren’t the only ones involved. Everyone from product managers to business analysts has a stake in developing and maintaining a strong web presence. Different teams have different strengths, knowledge, and skill sets. A marketing associate may not be as well versed in development as a software engineer, so how can you ensure that every member of your team is on the same page? That’s where behavior-driven development comes in.

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a development process that prioritizes collaboration between teams to help you build a site, app, or API in a way that serves everyone involved. When implementing a BDD process, a team is able to form a consistent, accessible language that can be understood by programmers and non-programmers alike. Test cases are written in natural language and take into account your business goals, user functionality, and expected outcomes.

We at LoadView are invested in helping your business thrive in every department, so let’s learn a bit more about BDD and see how BDD can help your team work together.

A Brief History of BDD

In 2006, software developer Dan North noticed that there were gaps in communication between departments within the company he was working at. It seemed as if less technical teams like product and marketing managers were being left in the dark about key developments, and software developers were left unaware of major user concerns while navigating their site.

From these gaps, North was able to develop a new system. Branching out of test-driven development (TDD), BDD focuses on real human behavior, plain English, and a clear logical model. This process takes into account business concerns, as well as technical demands. It took previously convoluted models and translated them into a new domain-specific language (DSL) that got as close as possible to plain, conversational English.

This DSL turned into BDD’s defining factor, the given/when/then model.

The Given/When/Then Model

In the given/when/then model, each part defines a stage of a transaction or interaction online.

• Given: Refers to the starting condition before the interface is acted upon by a user.
• When: Refers to the action performed by the user that sets off the interaction. A click, transaction, or keyword entered in a search bar are all possible “when” actions.
• Then: Refers to the expected result after the action occurs.

Here’s an example of a given/when/then scenario:

• Given that Account 1 has $0 and Account 2 has $100
• When Account 2 transfers $50 to Account 1
• Then Account 1 has $50 and Account 2 has $50

This plain English model makes programming situations easier to share between departments. The DSL can be understood by anyone, whether they are a developer or not. When running functional and nonfunctional tests, using a given/when/then model helps reduce gaps in communication.

This is the essential function of BDD: to use plain English to develop a DSL understood by all. There are many benefits to using BDD to develop your website, app, or API, and developing a DSL is only one of them.

Pros to Developing with BDD

BDD offers strong advantages if you’re working with a diverse team. Its focus on functionality, clear communication, and user experience makes it a useful process for online businesses and digital services with non-technical stakeholders. BDD is:

• Efficient: Having clearly defined functionality and language that are agreed upon by all stakeholders is a key benefit of BDD. With everyone on the same page, development from both the business and technical angles can take shape in a timely manner. With all teams working together, there is less need to go back and rework nonfunctional elements.
• Cost-effective: Not only is BDD good for your business values, it can also help reduce waste in the development process. Well-defined language makes it easier to create and validate test cases. These test cases can be automated with a clear understanding of what is expected and when. Automating these tests can help reduce the cost of application testing.
• High quality: With the help of non-development teams, designers and programmers get feedback about user experience earlier in the process. This encourages teams to think and develop from the user’s perspective. Developing from the user’s point of view also helps developers write stable, scalable, and testable code. This helps prevent user issues before they occur.

Cons to Developing with BDD

Although BDD can be a great process in certain situations, it’s not universal. BDD was created to solve problems and close gaps in the TDD approach. If programmers are less experienced, not familiar with the TDD development process, or heavily tied to specific tools and programming languages, BDD may take extra effort to implement effectively.

BDD relies on good communication. That means having a team of dedicated developers, product owners, QA teams, and business stakeholders who can communicate effectively with customers, users, and representatives of other teams. This can create additional overhead if the team does not have a clear process in place.

Popular BDD Tools

BDD has proved popular in the developer community. Many teams have adopted the BDD approach and use a variety of tools to support it. Here are a few popular BDD tools.

• Cucumber: Cucumber is a popular open-source platform for BDD collaboration. It helps teams build functionality in plain text and provides cohesiveness using a DSL that is easy to share with the whole team. It implements Gherkin syntax.
• Lettuce: Lettuce is built on top of Cucumber and works well for Python-based applications.
• SpecFlow: SpecFlow is another open-source BDD platform that uses Gherkin syntax. It is built for the .NET platform.

Behavior Driven Development with LoadView

BDD is a process, and performance testing can be an important part of that process. As teams connect BDD workflows with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing, performance expectations can also be defined earlier in the development cycle. For example, teams can create shared expectations around login speed, checkout reliability, API response times, or how an application should behave under expected user load.

LoadView runs performance tests that simulate real user behavior with simple scripts so you can support your BDD process with realistic performance data. Being able to test how your website performs under various user loads, user locations, and stress levels can help every department involved in behavior-driven development understand whether the application is meeting both technical and business expectations.

LoadView is an accessible platform that requires no previous coding knowledge, making it an excellent choice for a team working across multiple technical and non-technical departments. LoadView is built to test:

• Web pages
• Native mobile apps
• APIs

Try LoadView Today

BDD is designed to center business values during the development process while keeping the user end result in mind. LoadView can help you add performance testing to that process with tests and reports that are easier for both technical and non-technical teams to understand. Try LoadView for free or schedule a demo today to see how you can implement performance testing into your company’s BDD process.