Behavior Driven Testing - Focus on behavior and not just functionality!

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Traditionally, software testing teams always focused on functional and system verification of the product. While this is good in terms of gaining confidence in release readiness of your product, it may not help answering two important questions:

1. What product has is what customer wants? (Requirements traceability)

2. Focus on customer use-cases

So how to fix those issues? Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) holds a key!

So what is BDT? In the simple terms, its a derivative of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology. The idea behind BDD is to enable use of ubiquitous language, called Gherkin which lets you write all your artifacts in expressive english.

All software development projects starts with capturing of requirements and it is usually done by business analysts. When requirements are frozen, designers & developers create user stories for their development sprints. QA teams create test cases for their verification.

Traditionally all these artifacts (highlighted in bold) are written as per the respective team' own method. The problem arises, when there is a difficulty of understanding of artifacts by cross functional teams. This is the exact problem BDT/BDD addresses! By using common, expressive language by all project/product stakeholders, things become easy for everyone to understand. As a result, there are less issues in terms of understanding the requirements, which results into better product quality and conformance with user requirements.

Focus on behavior and not just functional verification.

Happy testing!

 

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