Working Software
Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a software development process that goes well with agile software development process that encourages collaboration among developers, quality assurance experts, and customer representatives in a software project. It encourages teams to use conversation and concrete examples to formalize a shared understanding of how the application should behave.[4] It emerged from test-driven development (TDD). Behavior-driven development combines the general techniques and principles of TDD with ideas from domain-driven design and object-oriented analysis and design to provide software development and management teams with shared tools and a shared process to collaborate on software development.
Although BDD is principally an idea about how software development should be managed by both business interests and technical insight, the practice of BDD does assume the use of specialized software tools to support the development process. Although these tools are often developed specifically for use in BDD projects, they can be seen as specialized forms of the tooling that supports test-driven development. The tools serve to add automation to the ubiquitous language that is a central theme of BDD.
BDD is largely facilitated through the use of a simple domain-specific language (DSL) using natural-language constructs (e.g., English-like sentences) that can express the behaviour and the expected outcomes. Test scripts have long been a popular application of DSLs with varying degrees of sophistication. BDD is considered an effective technical practice especially when the "problem space" of the business problem to solve is complexExtreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,[1][2][3] it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
Other elements of extreme programming include: programming in pairs or doing extensive code review, unit testing of all code, not programming features until they are actually needed, a flat management structure, code simplicity and clarity, expecting changes in the customer's requirements as time passes and the problem is better understood, and frequent communication with the customer and among programmers.[2][3][4] The methodology takes its name from the idea that the beneficial elements of traditional software engineering practices are taken to "extreme" levels. As an example, code reviews are considered a beneficial practice; taken to the extreme, code can be reviewed continuously (i.e. the practice of pair programming).