Behavior-Driven Automation Testing – In the rapidly evolving world of application development, Behavior-Driven Testing (BDT) has emerged as an essential approach to align technical requirements with test objectives. Poor communication and unclear requirements are often responsible for unsuccessful test implementations in automation testing. BDT tackles these issues effectively.
Organizations that successfully implemented BDT, resulted in a significant improvement in collaboration between developers and stakeholders, thereby enhancing the quality and efficiency of their applications in agile environments. This successful real-world approach provides a transformative impact in bridging the gap between technical execution and organizational objectives.
This article reveals what BDD testing is, and why it is necessary to implement it in the application development process and provides a clearer picture of the best practices for testing an agile environment.
Table of Contents
Overview of Behavior-Driven automation testing
BDD testing is designed to prevent misconceptions among developers, testers, and stakeholders. Despite its humble beginnings as a simple adaptation of test-driven development, BDD has evolved into a fully-fledged application development process.
The two primary components of the BDD method are usually separated:
The first part contains examples created in a common language to demonstrate behaviors or how users interact with the applications.
The second stage is to use those examples as the foundation for automated testing. It allows developers to test user functionality and ensures that the overall application functions as intended throughout the development life cycle.
Behavior-driven automation testing was designed to bridge the gap and facilitate departmental collaboration and communication. As a result, application development projects are managed and delivered more effectively.
Behavior-driven testing in agile environments
Behavior-driven automation testing is an application testing strategy that combines technical and organizational concerns when evaluating actual user behavior in agile application development.
It is a process of building test cases in a simple text language. The BDD scenario, which is based on specified requirements, defines the application’s behavior from the user’s perspective. This allows the development team to instantly recognize the existing needs while also allowing teams to thoroughly perform tests. Furthermore, the written scenarios can easily be transformed into automated tests.
Teams use the ‘given-when-then’ structure to design BDD test scenarios in a clear and understandable language, which they can easily monitor using a BDD testing framework. With this in mind, testers can convert organizations’ needs into appropriate applications and improve collaboration with all stakeholders involved.
Furthermore, it allows testers with less technical knowledge to be informed about what is going on with test development. By adopting the BDD testing framework, testers can significantly improve communication among key stakeholders while also making the process transparent.
Significance of BDD testing in the application development process
Testers may use a behavior-driven testing approach during their application development lifecycle for a variety of reasons:
- Teams prioritize defining the application’s behavior and operational logic over implementation details.
- User stories help teams understand application needs, which lowers misunderstandings and delays.
- Testers can create automated acceptance tests that are easy to read and manage.
- Teams can prevent issues from getting worse by getting early feedback on how the application behaves.
- Teams can enhance cooperation between technical and non-technical stakeholders for improved alignment and problem-solving by describing application behavior in a non-technical language.
Therefore, to make an informed decision, a testing team should consider these factors when deciding to implement behavior-driven development such as project complexity, collaboration among teams, stakeholder participation, test automation, modern tools and techniques, and project schedules.
Benefits of BDD testing in Agile environments
Behavior-driven testing offers several benefits to developers. This includes:
Test Clarity
Behavior-driven testing scenarios are designed based on what users will do with the application. As a result, while developing test scenarios, careful consideration is given to what to test and what not to test, as well as what the expected outcomes should be. This enables prioritization and clarifies the structure and purpose of the tests.
Collaboration Across the Organization
The use of a basic logical structure (if-when-then) and human-readable language makes the tests and their logic understandable to both developers and non-developers. This facilitates teamwork while discussing and writing tests.
Relevant Testing Scope
Prioritizing tests based on what the user will do ensures that the most common use cases are covered. This assures relevance and allows tests to be tailored to the user’s demands while still addressing all edge situations. No resources are forfeited.
Enable Automation
BDT tests can be integrated with the CI/CD pipeline and performed automatically on a predetermined schedule. This allows for adaptability and guarantees that developers can concentrate on future development.
With plenty of CI/CD tools on the market, teams may find it challenging to choose the right one that can be integrated with various other tools and platforms. LambdaTest is one of the most effective options for CI/CD tools. It is an automated and continuous testing solution that can integrate with the industry’s most popular CI/CD tools.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform. It enables testers to execute both automated and manual tests at scale. The platform enables testers to perform Selenium Python automated test scripts in real time across more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers.
Furthermore, LambdaTеst’s seamless integration with BDD frameworks such as SpecFlow, Cucumber, and Behat streamlines the BDD testing workflow. Utilizing this cloud-based platform testers can also perform automated cross-browser testing on a scalable grid that includes SpecFlow testing with Selenium C#, BDD testing with Behave, Selenium testing with Gherkin, and much more.
LambdaTest’s native built-in integrations enable testers to write, plan, and execute automated tests, and analyze results, within their preferred CI/CD pipeline. Integrations with a variety of CI/CD solutions help testers accelerate a strong delivery pipeline, accelerating the process of application delivery.
Enhanced Test Coverage
BDD testing concentrates on assessing the performance of an application system, making sure that all possible situations are accounted for. This minimizes the chance of errors and other problems being incorporated into the application.
Faster Feedback
BDD testing enables developers to get quick feedback, reducing the time required for identifying and resolving issues. This makes sure that the task is finished according to the timeline and without exceeding the budget.
Enhanced Quality
BDD testing ensures that the built application maintains a high degree of quality while meeting the organization’s needs and goals. This guarantees that the application satisfies user demands and is reliable and simple to use.
Reduced Costs
Through early identification and resolution of issues during the application development process, BDD testing reduces development expenses. Correcting problems at a later stage of development could sometimes end up being more expensive compared to addressing them in the early stages.
Increased Agility
BDD testing is an agile and adaptable testing method that can be customized to fit evolving testing goals and requirements. This ensures that the application aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives.
Use cases of Behavior-Driven automation testing
BBD testing can be used for a variety of tests. These consist of:
Integration Testing
Integration testing is the process of testing several application modules as a group to guarantee that they can all work together. BDT enables the development of clear and realistic scenarios for these integrations depending on the users’ behavior and language. Incorporating BDT into integration testing allows for the flexibility to test cross-module scenarios and evaluate the system from end to end.
API Testing
API testing, which is a component of integration testing, examines the reliability and functionality of the APIs in the organization layer of the architecture. Due to this, BDT is a great choice for testing APIs. Each step can be explicitly mapped into an API call under test by using BDT scenarios. Correlating each API call into a given-when-then phase and writing it down in clear words.
UI Testing
While certain organizations utilize BDT for UI testing, it is not a suggested best practice. The UI layer contains several, complicated scenarios. Each action might result in various consequences. Even apparently similar activities may result in a distinct UI, necessitating an entirely separate set of testing. As a result, building UI tests first in the given-when-then framework and then in code is hard and time-consuming. Furthermore, because the UI changes so frequently, such tests may be quite fragile. After all, BDT was designed to assess behavior, not visibility.
Limitations of BDD Test Cases in Agile Application Development
Writing BDD testing scenarios comes with a few drawbacks as well. Below, let’s examine them more closely:
Highly collaborative behavior- If testers are unable to work together, participate in the discussions, and provide timely and ongoing feedback, it may be hard to benefit from creating BDD test cases.
Time-consuming- BDD testing can be time-consuming to implement and manage, particularly for small projects. Creating and maintaining Gherkin scenarios can be time-consuming.
Requires well-defined requirements- To effectively describe application demands, BDD requires well-defined requirements for applications in the Gherkin scripts.
Difficult to combine with Agile development– BDD is best suited for waterfall projects with specified criteria. Agile requirements are continuously changing, making it challenging to incorporate BDD.
Difficult to implement on legacy systems- When developing a system from the ground up or making substantial changes to existing systems, BDD works best. With outdated systems, implementation could be more challenging.
Formulaic nature of Gherkin- The formulaic nature of Gherkin and the step definitions (Given/When/Then) can be challenging for testers
Best practices for Behavior-Driven automation testing in Agile Environments
The BDD testing is structured and iterative, starting from requirement gathering and continuing through to continuous improvement. Below, we outline the key considerations involved in the BDD Testing process.
Collaboration and Requirement Assemblage
Developers, testers, and stakeholders need to work together to collect and comprehend requirements at the beginning of the BDD testing process. This makes it possible for everyone to comprehend what has to be built and why. Making sure everyone is aware of the criteria is the goal.
Focus on Operations Value
To test the most important and valuable scenarios first, testers should prioritize scenarios and features based on the value of their operations.
Create User Stories and Scenarios
Developers must develop user stories based on the intended behavior from the end user’s perspective, then break them down into particular situations and describe them in an organized format such as Given-When-Then. It’s essential to remember that each scenario should address only one behavior. This standardized format facilitates the creation of concise scenarios that may be easily comprehended and automated.
Build Automated Tests
Test scenarios must be created with Gherkin and then converted to automated tests using BDD testing frameworks such as Cucumber, SpecFlow, Behave/JBehave, or TestCafe. These tools interpret Gherkin syntax and convert it into test code that interacts with the application. During this phase, the scenarios must be executable to be run during testing.
Integrate with Other Tools
BDD tools must be integrated with issue tracking, version control, and CI/CD pipeline to seamlessly run automated BDD tests and give quick feedback on how the application behaves.
Test Management Integration
To better manage and arrange the test data needed for BDD scenarios, testers can integrate BDD with test management tools and platforms.
Embracing Feedback
To make the necessary adjustments or enhancements, testers should routinely gather feedback from stakeholders, quality assurance, developers, and end users. Furthermore, it must be kept in mind that the goal of BDD is to improve teamwork. For this reason, scenarios should be simple to comprehend and accessible to all participants involved.
Conclusion
In conclusion, BDD testing entails describing user scenarios in an ordinary language, human-readable format, which considerably assists requirements alignment across various stakeholders. Clear test results and feature and scenario traceability must be provided by the testing tools used for BDD automated testing. Ensuring that test results are understandable by both technical and non-technical stakeholders to determine the application’s ongoing quality status by agreed requirements.
Best practices for the BDD technique enable the entire team to collaborate throughout the development cycles of testing in an agile environment, ensuring the application is designed to meet the intended criteria.