There have been a couple of articles published recently by Nikolay Advolodkin (SDTimes and SauceLabs) that use a straw man argument to critique Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). BDD is not test automation -- it’s collaborative requirements analysis combined with test-driven development (TDD), which despite the name, isn’t testing either.
When we founded Cucumber in 2013, our goal was to provide commercial services and products that would fund the development of the Cucumber open source project.
Today I’m excited to announce that Cucumber Ltd has been acquired by SmartBear. We have spent half a year getting to know each other, and I am very confident that the Cucumber project will be in good hands.
This article was first published for the Excelian Spark Magazine.
Developing custom software to support business processes can be a costly affair. Developers often make mistakes because they misunderstand the business requirements. This results in defects that usually go unnoticed until the software has been implemented, which leads to expensive and time-consuming rework, and ultimately causes the software to be delivered late and over budget.
When the software is finally delivered, often the world has moved on, and the software is already out of date.
Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is a collaborative approach to software development that bridges the communication gap between business and IT. BDD helps teams communicate requirements with more precision, discover defects early and produce software that remains maintainable over time. The BDD approach enhances agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.
It's been 11 years since Dan introduced BDD to me while we were working together at ThoughtWorks, and 9 years since he published the article Introducing BDD.
BDD has evolved a lot in the past decade. Dan's article is still a great read, but when I visit organisations who try to adopt BDD I see a lot of recurring problems. Many people still think BDD is a tool. Many people still think it's about testing. BDD is still poorly understood and frequently misappropriated.
Moreover, we know a lot more about what works and what doesn't work a decade later.
It's time to redefine what BDD is.
Is your team using Cucumber like this?
Fantastic! I hope you're reaping some benefits from that. But you can do better!
At CukeUp London the 3rd of April I gave a presentation of Cucumber Ltd - the company Matt, Julien and I have started. This post explains why we started the company, and how it will benefit you.
Cucumber reached a million downloads in the first three years and 5 million downloads 3 years later. I'm happy to have created such a popular tool, but saddened to see how it's misused and misunderstood.
If you think Cucumber is a testing tool, please read on, because you are wrong.
Cucumber was born out of the frustration with ambiguous requirements and misunderstandings between the people who order the software and those who deliver it.