Effective Behavior-Driven Development

By Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose

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Software is the product of an evolving conversation among users, business stakeholders, and developers. The goal of behavior-driven development (BDD) is to capture that conversation as a set of clear, testable behaviors. This book explores BDD's three key pillars (Discovery, Formulation, and Automation) with practical examples that will help you spark meaningful collaboration and build a shared language for creating software that meets user needs every time.

By using understandable examples and everyday business terms, BDD ensures that everyone--including the development team--understands exactly how the software should behave. BDD also ensures your documentation evolves with your software and naturally lends itself to seamless automated testing. And with more than two decades of hands-on experience, BDD now boasts an incredible ecosystem of tools, patterns, and best practices, all captured in this new book

In Effective Behavior-Driven Development you will learn how to:

- Understand BDD workflow and responsibilities
- Capture concrete examples as a testable specification
- Run an Example Mapping workshop
- Write living business documentation
- Patterns for maintainable automation

About the book

Effective Behavior-Driven Development is a guide for BDD as it works today. It captures the latest approaches, automation patterns, and tools of modern BDD. It's divided into three parts, each covering one of the key practices of BDD--Discovery, Formulation, and Automation. First, Discovery lays out collaboration tools for creating shared understanding, through structured conversations focused on business rules and concrete examples. Then, Formulation shows how to capture those examples in clear, business-friendly language that describes the desired system behavior. Finally, in Automation developers will find the book's comprehensive pattern catalog for creating maintainable living documentation.

About the reader

For both technical and non-technical stakeholders in the software development process.

About the author

G sp r Nagy is the creator of SpecFlow & Reqnroll, brings over 20 years of experience as a coach, trainer, and test automation expert. He currently works at Spec Solutions where he leads SpecSync, aiding teams in test traceability with Azure DevOps and Jira.

Seb Rose has been a consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 40 years. During his career, he has worked for companies ranging from large to small, including IBM and Amazon. He's now an independent software consultant, promoting effective ways of working to the software development and testing community.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1633435253
• ISBN13: 9781633435254
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Manning
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.4" x 9.3"