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Seb Rose
Co-author of The BDD Books
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Keep your scenarios BRIEF

Seb Rose
Co-author of The BDD Books

Over the years that we have been using Gherkin, our approach to writing scenarios has evolved. Because Gherkin is very close to natural language it's very easy to learn, but just like writing reports or stories, it takes practice to do it well. There are three main goals that we try to keep in mind when writing scenarios:

  • Scenarios should be thought of as documentation, rather than tests.
  • Scenarios should enable collaboration between business and delivery, not prevent it.
  • Scenarios should support the evolution of the product, rather than obstruct it.

The following six principles work together to support these goals. To make them easier to remember, we've arranged it so that the first letter of each principle makes up an acronym, BRIEF, which is itself the sixth principle.

Introduction to TDD and BDD

Seb Rose
Co-author of The BDD Books

There are four subsections to this article:

  • TDD
  • BDD
  • Contradiction
  • xDD

We’ll start off with an introduction to TDD. I’ll go through that quite quickly because I guess most of you reading this are already doing that. Then, I’ll spend a little more time on BDD and then deal with the contradictions between the two, before getting slightly more philosophical with xDD.