Ask HN: BDD and Gherkin tests, do they provide value in the real world? Recently stumbled upon BDD and the process of describing software from behaviour. I know there are seriously prolific software engineers amongst the Hacker News crowd and I could use a second opinion from within the industry. What are your thoughts on BDD in general, with everything included (Gherkin, Cucumber etc.). What benefits have you yourself experienced (if any) or perhaps disadvantages of such ideas? |
* Excessive verbosity
* Not type safe
* It lacks story abstractions (i.e. you can't flexibly create variations on a scenario, extend existing scenarios, etc.).
* You need to fiddle with regexes.
A side effect of these semantic/syntactic problems is that gherkin stories end up being too vague to be useful - i.e. the meat of the story is often missing.
I created a StrictYAML based alternative with python that I think has all of the benefits, fixes those 4 problems and doesnt suffer from traditional "YAML" problems: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory
I call this "BDD with meat".
One of the arguments, as far as I understand for the BDD verbosity is that fact that the requirements are easy to communicate with customers and so therefore would be more precise in going from defining requirements to actually building the right thing. How true do you find this?
Cucumber essentially treats documentation and specification as equivalent, while hitchstory treats documentation as a more verbose and readable artefact that can be autogenerated from a combination of a spec and a template.