Part 3. How do I build it? Coding the BDD way

In part 2 you learned about the importance of conversation and collaboration in the BDD process, and that you need to work together to define acceptance criteria in a clear and unambiguous format that can be automated using tools such as Cucumber, JBehave, or SpecFlow. In part 3, we’ll look under the hood and see how you can do this automation. Whereas part 2 should be understood by the whole team, part 3 gets a bit more technical and will be of more interest to testers and developers.

As with any code base, the maintenance of automated acceptance tests can be costly if they’re not written well from the onset. In chapter 7, you’ll learn how to structure and organize your automated acceptance criteria to make them easier to understand and to maintain.

In chapter 8, you’ll learn about writing automated acceptance criteria for web applications, including why and when you should implement your acceptance criteria as web tests. This is an area where many teams struggle, so we’ll look in some detail at how to write high-quality automated web tests using Selenium WebDriver.

Automated acceptance tests aren’t just for web testing. In chapter 9, we’ll look at techniques for implementing automated acceptance tests for pure business rules and other requirements that don’t need to be verified through the UI.