Unifying Behavior Driven Development Templates

Abstract

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) offers a way to express scenarios, written in structured natural language, on how the system should act to fulfill a requirement. Numerous templates have been written to construct BDD scenarios and various practices were born out of usage. Nevertheless, we mostly fail to find documentation on the used templates and understand empirical practices. This paper explores empirically the BDD templates used in practice by evaluating the keywords mostly associated to the GIVEN, WHEN and THEN scenario dimensions. It then studies whether we can use these existing keywords to build a set of non-redundant concepts covering the representational needs and being usable as reference when constructing BDD scenarios. We consolidate these findings in a meta-model.