Foreword

Since its modest beginnings as a coaching experiment over a decade ago, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) has taken off in a way I never would have imagined. I’d like to tell you how it started, and why I believe it is more relevant today than it has ever been.

When I first started working on BDD back in 2003, the software industry was going through a revolution. It was a time of possibility, with everything I knew about enterprise software delivery open to question. Two years earlier, a group of software professionals had come together to formulate the Agile Manifesto, and the year after that, in 2002, I was fortunate enough to join some of the pioneers of this new movement. In April of that year, I was hired in the newly opened London office of ThoughtWorks, Inc., a software consulting company at the forefront of the agile movement. Their chief scientist Martin Fowler was one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and a few years earlier had written Refactoring (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999), which had a profound effect on how I thought about software. He was also on the first XP project at Chrysler with Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham. It is safe to say his agile credentials are pretty solid, and he had joined the team at ThoughtWorks because they worked in a way that resonated with those values.