On the QaFoo blog today there's a new post looking at behavior driven development and a PHP-based tool that makes implementing it in your workflow simpler (Behat).

While unit, integration and system tests - especially combined with the methodology of Test Driven Development (TDD) - are great ways to push the technical correctness of an application forward, they miss out one important aspect: the customer. None of these methods verify that developers actually implement what the customer desires. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) can help to bridge this gap.

The introduce some of the basic concepts behind behavior driven development and include an example of a Gherkin-formatted test example checking a page to ensure if has the correct content. They briefly define the structure of the test then take it into a Behat context and show how it would be implemented.

Of course, the examples shown above are only very rudimentary, missing e.g. variables and other advanced features. However, they should have explained what BDD is all about: Communication