Tech Lead Journal
#148 - Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Essentials - Jan Molak & John Ferguson Smart
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Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- The screenplay pattern in behavior-driven development (BDD) is a user-centered approach that improves code maintainability and understandability by capturing the business intent behind functionality through actors, tasks, interactions, abilities, and questions.
- BDD can be incorporated into legacy software through incremental application to new features or retroactively adding executable specifications, ensuring improved quality and maintainability by focusing on communication, collaboration, and understanding requirements.
Deep dives
Screenplay pattern: A user-centered approach to automated acceptance tests
The screenplay pattern is a user-centered approach to writing high-quality automated acceptance tests. It encourages the use of layers of abstraction and helps capture the business vocabulary of a domain. The pattern consists of five building blocks: actors, tasks, interactions, abilities, and questions. Actors represent users or external systems interacting with the system under test. Tasks are the specific goals and actions performed by actors. Interactions are the lower-level actions performed by actors to interact with the system. Abilities are thin wrappers around integration libraries that enable interactions. Questions retrieve information from the system. The screenplay pattern provides a way to capture the business intent behind the functionality and improve code maintainability and understandability.
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