Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is a set of practices and tools that enables business analysts, developers and testers to collaborate on a single source of truth: Executable Specifications.

Executable Specifications are living documents that serve several purposes.

• For business analysts they are a concise way to express how they want the software to behave
• For developers they are unambiguous requirements that guide and validate the implementation
• For testers they are automated regression tests

Executable Specifications are easy to read by both humans and computers. They are great for building a shared understanding across different roles on a software project. This shifts the focus from finding bugs to preventing them.

Product owners and business analysts are encouraged to join this session even though the second half will involve a little coding. Non-technical attendees will be paired up with technical attendees to create executable specifications together.

As lead developer of Cucumber and author of The Cucumber Book, Aslak gets asked to consult with organisations who want to introduce Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). Time after time, he meets teams who are trapped doing half-arsed agile. They do the easy, obvious, visible agile practices, and none of the powerful, hard-to-master, hard-to-see ones.

When these teams ask for help learning BDD, we get a chance to remind them how important conversations and collaboration are in software development. We teach them to write tests before they write code, as a way to explore and discover the hidden details of a requirement just before they dive in and start building it. This talk will make you wince with recognition, laugh with despair, and finally inspire you with stories of teams that have finally, after years of flaccid scrumming, discovered the true collaborative heart of agile software development. You’ll see patterns you recognise from your own teams, and gain insights about how to fix them.