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BDD Coming to a tool near you


By Andrew Binstock
July 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) sounds like either a modern theory of raising children or yet another way to mess with how programmers write code. It is the latter, but fortunately, unlike other xDD methodologies, it suggests only small changes to the way you currently do things. In its simplest form, BDD specifies the behavior of code and tries to have the code be expressive of that behavior, rather than maintaining a disconnected relationship between specification and implementation.

Let me illustrate. Behaviors are frequently expressed with keywords, such as: given, when, then and should. So, for example: given the 2008 tax tables, when a head of family has taxable income of less than US$12,000, then the tax should be $0. At a lower level that is closer to code: given a new linked list, then the list should be empty. And: given an empty linked list, when we add an item, then the list should not be empty.

At first blush, this might seem like another way of writing an if/then statement, save with a level of verbosity that exceeds COBOL. True, but that misses the point: First, you can define your scenarios, then insert the code into the scenarios that make it happen. Tools, such as easyb (which uses the JVM scripting language Groovy), enable code to be inserted into the scripts resulting in a very readable explanation of what is being done. Here is an example from the easyb site that illustrates the process.

Starting with the requirements articulated with BDD-style language: Given that a user mistypes a ZIP code, and given the ZIP code-validation service is up and running, when validation is performed, then the service should indicate the ZIP code is invalid.

In easyb, the implementation is woven into the constraints, and the result is:

      given "an invalid zip code", {
        invalidzipcode = "221x1"
      }

      and "given the zipcodevalidator is initialized", {
        zipvalidate = new ZipCodeValidator()
      }

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