Relevancy should be fundamental to an app development process. Do you agree? Specifically, when you are trying to pass through the long app development processes, you find yourself stuck at the following questions.
- Why are you developing an application?
- Who will use the application?
- What should you include in your application?
- What should you test in a feature?
- When should you test for a feature?
As you can see, the “what,” “why,” and “when” questions hold high importance during development. Until as a power team, you have these answers with relevance, your development team might not “get the product right” at the first time.
Therefore, a product goes through multiple iterations every time before a final product is launched into the market.
Instead of thinking of the reasons behind multiple iterations, many entrepreneurs prefer to leave it “as it is” or release a product that “just works OK.” However, this approach needs to end. And hence, came into the picture TDD, ATDD, and BDD. Wait… Wait… I am elaborating the terms for you…
TDD stands for Test Driven Development, ATDD stands for Acceptance Test-Driven Development, and BDD stands for Behavior Driven Development. In this blog, we would be specifically dealing with behavior-driven development (BDD), what are behavior-driven development tests, and how you should define a behavior-driven development cycle.
To start with,
What is Behavior Driven Development?
Behavior Driven Development (BDD) revolves around satisfying the user’s needs. It helps you write codes specific to the user’s expectations. This further means that you can write codes for the features that are required and eliminate irrelevant code writing.
BDD would scale up app development and help teams build applications faster. BDD is written to keep everyone from management to developers on the same page by writing codes and cases for specific behavior. The concept was initiated by Dan North, who is a technology expert & organizational consultant based in London.
The concept aims at clearing the communication gap between developers, testers, and product owners. This way, it helps entrepreneurs to develop a platform that a user wants and thereby mark their place in the market.
This process is a huge success in an Agile environment where the entire team of product owners, business analysts, UI UX designers, quality testers sit together to discuss the
- Application’s behavior from a user perspective;
- And application’s features from developers’ perspective.
The entire team will go through the selected features list, and if everyone agrees, the same is then taken forward for development. The collaborative approach brings the best of the results as compared to the individual’s effort put behind app development.
The next thing to discuss in this topic is,
How does behavior-driven development work?
Behavior-driven development needs you to follow the following set of steps.
- User behavior understanding;
- Knowing application’s specific requirements;
- Running prototypes;
- Writing codes and making necessary changes;
- Testing and running the final product.
Are there any prerequisites for implementing BDD?
BDD follows a chain of actions that can be explained in a common language. As much as we appreciate the advantages it delivers to the entire team, there are some essential things to have in place before its implementation.
Requirement #1:
You need to have user stories explained with an understandable example.
Requirement #2:
You should not pick up random examples; they should be concrete enough to be represented as a test case.
Requirement #3:
You should grab a proper understanding of the “given-when-then” formula.
Given-when-then is a semi-structured way to write test cases. Given a test scenario, When the action is done, and Then what should be the outcome.
Requirement #4:
One should know how to write “the specification of the behavior of the class.”
Why should you adopt Behavior-Driven Development?
BDD aids business management and delivery milestones in a number of ways.
- It allows you to keep track of all of the pre-decided business objectives.
- It aligns your business development needs with the users’ expectations.
- BDD is an effective way of setting up seamless communication between the entire team, including developers, testers, and business owners.
- BDD test cases are written in a common language understandable by everyone.
- It helps you integrate users’ expectations into the application.
- The outcome of the behavior-driven development solutions is quite satisfactory and helps you survive the market competition for a long time.
- BDD helps you decrease the development time as well as costs drastically. It also helps you reduce any potential risks in the future.
- BDD helps in improving the quality of code and delivers faster results.
- It assists in defining the business acceptance criteria even before the development is initiated.
- BDD lets you focus on granular requirements of the development, which otherwise would have been overlooked.
However, along with the upside, there is a downside of BDD too.
- In order to implement BDD, you should have enough knowledge about TDD;
- If your company has adopted a waterfall methodology, BDD might fall short.
- The initiator should specify the requirements in advance to implement BDD effectively.
- Only if you have technical expertise on board can you think of implementing BDD.
So, yeah, as you can figure it out, BDD really makes sense only when it is implemented correctly. It is the best set of practices that should be followed across organizations for the development of a user-centric application.
Talking about user-centric application development, Why are user stories needed in BDD?
User stories deal with a test case that defines to whom it will happen, what will happen, and when is the outcome. It is the best way to figure out users’ needs and how the same can be aligned with yours.
You need to chart our various user requirements for initiating a behavior-driven development process. The collected requirements are iterated multiple times until you find out what are the exact specific needs of the users. User stories assure you that you have a successful product development in place rather than an unsuccessful one.
By including user stories, you have a better chance to attract users and connect with them.
To compile up,
- User stories help you in structuring requirements.
- It helps you in finalizing which set of requirements should be addressed at priority and which should be ignored.
- User stories assist you in writing valid test cases and thereby helps in improving the quality of the product.
A standard format of user stories as laid out in the Dan North is,
What tools can you use for Behavior-Driven Development?
If you wish to maximize the outcome from BDD, you should use,
Cucumber:
Cucumber is a framework written in plain simple language, English defined by Gherkin language. The framework processes in Gherkin language to develop relevant test cases for businesses.
Specflow:
Specflow is another version of the Cucumber framework developed from Ruby on Rails. Again, Specflow also uses the Gherkin language.
Parting Words:
Behavior-driven development would be the next talk about topics in organizations. Why don’t you be an early bird and adopt the best practices for your project? If you need any help with your mobile app design process or developing a customized solution, please knock on our doors. Thank You!