BDD - The Two Approaches

I've been using BDD for a little while now and think I've gotten to grips with most of the ideas, however the more I learn the more questions I have. Rather than wait for answers I thought I'd blog about what I'm trying now, so when reading this keep in mind that these are just my current personal opinions and should be taken with a pinch of salt.

My intention was to write one big blog entry but it immediately got too long and unfocussed so I decided to break things out a bit and I thought I'd start by describing how I view BDD.

To me there are two styles of BDD:

1. North BDD (xBehave) - The style Dan North and colleagues created and evolved and which is often seen as the given/when/then style. To me this style will be useful in bringing everyone into the requirements process and getting them talking the same language whilst providing a process to ensure that the requirements feed directly into development. In my view best suited to higher level testing and in particular to acceptance testing.
2. Astels BDD (xSpec) - The style Dave Astels popularised and which, to me, is a new form of TDD which has some serious benefits. You can use this style for any testing, from acceptance testing downwards.

Some have argued that the given/when/then style is not needed, and that the xSpec style can be used for all levels of testing. I've tried this but didn't entirely like the results so I currently use both approaches because I actually think that using a different testing styles for acceptance testing and all other developer testing has benefits, particularly because the two types of test/specifications are quite different:

1. Level - Although many of the BDD examples are against the domain/service layer level I actually think that in many systems you'll actually be using this style for your acceptance testing, probably from the top down.
2. Language - Dan North makes a big deal of the fact that BDD can draw in the UL. I'm not so sure this is true because user stories aren't necessarily in the UL. However even if it is true it only applies to some of the specifications we're writing, namely those describe the user experience (acceptance level) and domain model.
3. Reuse - When you're writing acceptance tests you've got a lot of potential for reuse so, in my view, composition wins out over inheritance. I'll describe this more in a separate post, to me, that's the biggest technical reason to look at xBehave (I just found out this is also Dan's view, see comments on this post).
4. Tools - I'll cover this later but although I think you can do both styles of BDD without any tools I do think that Dan North's style is the one that will benefit more from additional tools/frameworks (such as NBehave) particularly if you are interested in people outside the development team writing the inputs and seeing the outputs (notably reports).
5. Patterns - In my limited experience patterns/approaches that you come up with for developer testing don't necessarily scale up to acceptance testing where there is more reuse/complexity. I thus think that when viewing much of what is written about BDD you need to be clear on what type of testing the person is describing.
6. Intent - Users/domain experts are only going to be interested in the behaviour of some parts of the system, notably the GUI and the domain so using the xBehave style right the way down is an un-necessary burden.

Its unfortunate that Astels and North both called their approach BDD, but thats the way of it. However we do need to get our terminology straight and that starts with understanding the differences between the two styles of BDD.

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