What does BDD mean in SOFTWARE

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is a software development process that focuses on capturing the behavior of software and connecting that behavior to testing. It combines the general techniques and principles of Test Driven Development (TDD) with ideas from Domain-driven Design (DDD). It enables developers to capture customer requirements in the form of scenarios, bridging the gap between business needs and technical implementation.

BDD improves communication between business stakeholders, developers, and testers by providing a shared language and set of tools for discussing system behavior and example scenarios. By advocating collaboration between different parties throughout the development lifecycle, BDD encourages an environment where everyone understands requirements before they are defined in code. This helps reduce waste due to incorrect assumptions made by any one party in isolation.

The core principles of BDD are collaboration between business, developers, and testers; defining requirements in human readable terms; living documentation through example scenarios; test automation; meaningful feedback loops about quality; frequent integration of code; and refactoring to improve code design without changing the existing behavior.

By following best practices related to BDD such as writing executable specification tests, integrating code frequently, and working collaboratively across departments, organizations can expect improved accuracy when it comes to meeting customer requirements as well as higher quality products overall.

TDD focuses mainly on unit tests while BDD extends this concept through all layers of testing up to acceptance tests. While both promote test automation in order to ensure timely feedback about code quality, TDD takes more time because it requires extensive unit testing which often covers features more than once from multiple perspectives whereas BDD leverages existing systems already tested at lower levels in order for automated tests at higher levels to focus solely on validating system behaviors.

Manual testing strategies should still be used as part of your QA strategy but should be limited in scope due to high cost compared with automated tests achieved using a tool such as Cucumber or JBehave powered by BRF++. With automated testing results provided within minutes compared with days or weeks for manual approaches, there is very little incentive not too automate whenever possible as long as you have clearly defined user stories written in plain language which describe expected results.

Both business stakeholders and developers are responsible for creating Gherkin based feature files which serve as living documents containing examples describing various types of user behaviour that must be supported by the system being developed. Developers then create step definitions which map each Given/When/Then statement found within each feature file into actual collective testcases using programming languages like Java or Python.

To fully implement Behaviour Driven Design within an organization teams must create documents such as user stories written in plain language which describe expected outcomes based on actions taken by individual users or groups of users; Additionally Business Rules Documents containing computable rules needed by applications running inside environments such Lastly Domain Object Models representing relationships betwen objects described within Feature Files.