altnetconf - Behavior Driven Design

This post is separated into summary and thoughts.

Summary

This thing called "Behavior Driven Design" (BDD) doesn't seem to have a formalized definition. Not everyone in attendance could agree on what "it" is. However, the most clear definition presented involves several components. Scott Bellware asserted that BDD = UserStories + TDD + UbiquitousLanguage + Solubility.

Some constraints on the above components should be explained. User stories must be well-formed. So, the idea is that during a conversation that the business analyst and the developer would work together to produce a story of the form "As a... I want to... So that..." The assumption is made that the TDD being used is driving design at a granular level with only one assertion per test. To extend Scott's definition of Solubility linked to above, another term "grokability" was proposed by Scott Hanselman.

The Behavior Driven Design (BDD) session began with many questions, asked many more, and perhaps answered a few things. Bellware started by saying that BDD is not about testing. He later stated that BDD provides better tests. So, to summarize, BDD is not about testing... except when it is. So, that make that about as clear as mud.

Much of the discussion centered on improving the conversation. More specifically, the conversation between the developer and the business analyst was discussed.

One criticism presented is that BDD is using programming languages to discuss things with the business analyst. The concern was that we would be asking business analysts to write specifications including the markup. This bred a great deal of consternation.

This critique was perhaps diffused later when the suggestion was made that the business analyst would sit down with the programmer, and the two would discuss the user story and the specifications. During that discussion, the developer would transcribe the conversation into the story markup used by the spec tool (RSpec, NBehave...). Another possibility presented was that the conversation could be initially captured onto a story card and then transcribed to the tool by the developer at a later time.

There was the assertion made that BDD provides or formalizes context for conversations with the business analyst and context for the developer to write the implementation.

Scott Hanselman says, "This is like NUnit that generates prose." There seems to be a bit of buy-in for this. Perhaps C# doesn't lend itself to the readability of the spec implementation. The business owner writes this through the ears of the developer that is sitting next to him.

Part of BDD is generating a specification document directly from the tests. This allows the tests and the information being passed back to the business analyst to stay in sync better. This is NOT to replace verbal communication, but again to provide a talking point to augment the conversation.

Thoughts

It seemed as though the thoughts around BDD have application in many parts of the development life-cycle. BDD practices are useful for clarifying the discussions that should be taking place during the entire process. The initial definition of user stories is helped by these practices. During development, BDD practices help developers see the bigger picture. Finally, and importantly, the executable specifications serve as a note to the future self. In other words, when you come back to the code, it is easier to understand why the test was written in the first place.

Much of the confusion came about because these thoughts are useful in so many different places. It seemed that participants saw the potential to have certain pains alleviated, then latched onto that particular portion of usefulness. BDD is aspect-oriented. It is a cross-cutting concern and does not simply fit into a single portion of the development process. Wherever there is conversation in the development process, formalizing that conversation helps to remove ambiguity.

Perhaps this is more useful when you MUST generate documentation. Not everyone needs to have everything generated in paper form. For some business, people, they feel better seeing the specifications generated as either a sheet of paper or a web site. Even in situations where this documentation must be generated, this documentation is not set in stone.

I'm pretty convinced that we don't need a separate tool to do effective Behavior Driven Design. We need to get much better at language - both natural language and expressing natural language with programming languages. As if the natural language wasn't ambiguous enough, we are forced to complicate it by writing something that the parser can understand.

The conversation about this is still in process. I'm sure that I don't know everything about this. I hope to continue to look in this area and find ways to write better software with less pain.