Part 1. First steps

Welcome to the world of BDD! The aim of part 1 of this book is to give you both a 50,000-foot-high view of the world of Behavior-Driven Development, and also a first taste of what BDD looks like in the field.

In chapter 1, you’ll learn about the motivations and origins of Behavior-Driven Development and where it sits with regard to Agile and other software development approaches. You’ll discover the broad scope of BDD, learning how it applies at all levels of software development, from high-level requirements discovery and specification to detailed low-level coding. And you’ll learn how important it is not only to build the software right, but also to build the right software.

As practitioners, we like to keep things grounded in real-world examples, so in chapter 2 you’ll see what BDD looks like in a real project, all the way from discovering the requirements and automating the high-level acceptance criteria to building and verifying the design and implementation, through to producing accurate and up-to-date technical and functional documentation.

By the end of part 1, you should have a good grasp of the motivations and overall broad scope of BDD, as well as an idea of what it looks like in practice at different levels of the software development process.