I want to know that,does BDD just work in acceptance test level? If not, does it work in unit test level as well? Does BDD have any suggestion For Unit tests?
thank you
I want to know that,does BDD just work in acceptance test level? If not, does it work in unit test level as well? Does BDD have any suggestion For Unit tests?
thank you
BDD is just a way of defining the specifications for an area of functionality. The idea is to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical people by using human readable syntax of some kind and to use specific examples to define the desired behaviour rather than talking in the abstract. As such it is a tool to help people work together and define the business' requirements for the new functionality. This is the primary point of BDD. Not testing.
The definitions that come out of BDD are however, useful for acceptance testing as they define the expected behaviour that was agreed upon. As such many great tools like cucumber are available to facilitate automation of these scenarios to cut down on your testing time.
With regard to using BDD for something like unit tests, the idea of using BDD and non-technical descriptions is to help involve non-technical people. If there are no non technical people involved in the creation of your unit tests (which I guess is the most likely case) then why bother with it? Technical people can read unit tests that are properly written, just fine. The unit tests that you're writing will come out of the functionality that is described by your BDD scenarios anyway.
However, if there is some technical detail of what you're working on that you're having trouble describing, and your team are comfortable working in a BDD way then definitely give the non-technical language and specific examples approach a go. I just wouldn't bother using the the human readable language version of the example in your unit test.
Edit: After reading xmojmr 's comment about your question, I can absolutely see the benefit of using BDD tools and syntax to make your unit tests more readable/easier to plan out, but I think this is quite different from BDD in general, which is more about bridging a communication gap.
BDD actually started at the class level. The first incarnation of JBehave was a replacement for JUnit that avoided the word "test". It was only later that the system-level stuff came along after Dan North explained mock objects to Chris Matts, an analyst at the time who was learning how to code.
These days, even unit testing frameworks don't insist that you start your test methods with the word "test", and the frameworks for the dynamic languages are pretty much derived from RSpec, which was a port of JBehave's early functionality to Ruby anyway.
So, yes, it's perfectly possible to do BDD at that level.
Of course, alannichols is right in saying that the audience is different, being non-technical.
So why would you want to do BDD?
As Dan says in that first link, it turns out that talking about behaviour is more useful than talking about tests. In BDD, we just avoid the word test. We prefer talking about examples and how things should behave rather than pass or fail.
By having conversations around the desired behaviour of a system or class, and providing examples of that behaviour, you can explore it more easily than when you're talking about testing.
However, because it's a non-technical audience, I find it's enough to put the "given, when, then" in comments. You can see an example here. You don't need an explicit BDD tool.
If you can't find another dev to talk about the behaviour with, I suggest you find a rubber duck.