BDD expanded as Behavior-Driven Development looks like an easy task. Tests are created in a format that is easy to read. In turn, feedback from Developers, business sponsors and Product Owners become possible. These tests are living documents for your team. In turn, you need not have any requirements. The tools help you automate your test suite and they are easy to use as well. After each test run, reports are produced. This helps with documenting every step and it will also show you where your tests fall.

BDD – A Basic Understanding:

When it comes to software engineering, BDD is an Agile Software Development process. It motivates teamwork among customer representatives, quality assurance experts and Developers in a software project. It also motivates teams to employ concrete and conversation examples. They are recommended to do it for formalizing a shared understanding of how the application should act. BDD surfaced from test-driven Development shortly called TDD. The positive feature of BDD is that it brings together the general principles and techniques of TDD with inputs from object-oriented analysis and design and domain-driven design for providing software Development and management teams with shared tools and processes to work together on software Development.

Indeed, BDD is basically an idea about how software Development should be handled by technical people and businesses, as a practice, BDD does undertake the employment of specialized software tools for backing up the Development process. Indeed, BDD tools are generally Developed particularly for use in BDD projects. Nevertheless, you can see them as special forms of tooling for underwriting test-driven Development. The Behavior Driven Development tools to serve to complement ubiquitous language with automation, which is the core theme of Behavior-Driven Development. 

BDD is mostly enabled via the use of simple domain-specific language with the help of natural-language constructs. For instance, it is possible to use English sentences to define the behavior and the result expected. For domain-specific languages, test scripts are being used for a long with different levels of sophistication. Behavior-Driven Development is regarded as an effective technical practice particularly when the problem space of the organizational issue to solve is hard to understand.

Key Features of BDD:

Behavior Driven Development pays attention to the following:

• Offering a shared procedure and tools, thereby enabling communication to the software Developers, business analysts and stakeholders to come together and converse on software Development with the objective of delivering the product with value to the business. 
• What should be done by a system and what should not be and the method of implementing it?
• Providing better visibility and readability
• Verification of the proper working of the software.
• Verifying whether the software meets the requirements of customers rightly.

The Best BDD Tools:

Some BDD Tools have gained immense popularity for some reasons. To help you select the right BDD Tool, here is a review of the top Behavior-Driven Development tools available in the market:

1. Zephyr Scale:

One of the key reasons for the popularity of this tool is that it is free. It aids with writing tests that are simple to comprehend by any person irrespective of the level of technical knowledge. To arrive at the best behavior set, Developers, testers, business owners and stakeholders can work together on this problem statement when this tool is used.

With the help of the Zephyr Scale, you can then change the behavior sets into Acceptance Test Conditions. As a tool, it helps with maintaining both the requirement statement and the test conditions in a single place.

2. Cucumber:

When thinking about cucumber, most of us get its cool nature into our thoughts. This BDD tool is one such cool tool as it is a free open-source tool. When the free version is called Cucumber Open, it also has a paid version called Cucumber Pro. When you use the free version in contradiction of your code, the executable specifications are compared.

You can learn more about this tool from Cucumber School, which offers tutorials to help you comprehend the best knowledge about Cucumber. It supports different programming languages that include Java, Python, and .NET. As against other BDD Tools, this is widely used by many organizations.

3. SpecFlow:

If you wish to use one of the most in-demand Behavior Driven Development tools, you can confidently choose SpecFlow. This tool also has two versions. One is open source and the other is premium. The premium version is called SpecFlow+, while the free version needs a distinct unit test runner like Unit or MS Test. Only then, you can execute test scenarios. But, the paid version comes with a runner suitable for BDD Testing. Even, with the paid version, you can expect other features like integrations with Microsoft Excel, premium support, and living documentation.

4. JBehave:

JBehave is very much similar to Cucumber. This is yet another easy-to-understand tool for the entire team. In addition to its own JBehave Syntax, this tool also supports Gherkin. This is more popular across the world and both these can work until you are consistent in your choice between these two. JBehave offers better configuration options, thereby standing better than Cucumber. The reports from this tool are very detailed. However, to get feedback from every step, you will require more configuration. JBehave is a powerful tool indeed. Nevertheless, it is not easy to get started. Teams will have to ask themselves about the features they require and whether or not understanding the various configurations of the tool is worth it.

5. Easy B:

This BDD Tool uses stories as verification units. In most instances, it is written with Groovy and is compatible to work with Groovy or Java Languages. You can use this tool for generating user stories and declaring the specifications. As this tool uses Groovy Script, it is possible to write specifications in English as against to programmer-centric statements. This makes EasyB satiate the BDD Model. 

When it comes to Unit Testing, EasyB comes in handy. It even supports JDBC Connection and it is offered with external plug-ins. The unique thing about this tool is that it does not have any IDE integration. It offers reporting tools to help users get data in HTML and XML formats.

6. Concordion:

If you would like to use one of the most dominant BDD tools for testing for creating acceptance test mechanization scripts, this tool is for you. It backs Java Integrated Development Environments like Netbeans and Eclipse. Even, this tool supports Excel, which permits you to create the specifications in spreadsheets. The reporting feature of this BDD tool is an added advantage. With this facility, you can generate reports that are not only easy to understand but are also good-looking.

7. Codeception:

This tool is one of the most familiar frameworks for PHP. It is inspired by BDD and it is offered as a complete stake-testing framework with takes care of functional testing, API Testing and even unit testing apart from BDD Testing. 

If your team looks for a more flexible kind of Developer-focused testing framework, your team will love this framework as compared to any others in this list.

8. Gauge:

The main purpose of JBehave and Cucumber BDD Tools discussed above is to work with BDD, Gauge was not created for this purpose. If your objective is to automate things, you can consider using this tool. 

The tests that Gauge uses are written in Markdown. It means that it is readable with ease. Nevertheless, without a more standard format like then, when and given BDD circumstances, tests can differ greatly, and based on the author, some tests turn out to be more acceptable for business owners as compared to others. This tool works with multiple languages such that the automation team can benefit from what they already use. This tool also offers to report. Above all, you can get the reports with screenshots to spot the places in which the tests failed.

Now, you can choose one of these Behavior Driven Development tools to meet your organizational needs.

Origin of BDD:

You can understand the importance of BDD when you know its origin. Here are some details to know in this regard:

The money you will have to spend on correcting errors will increase to a great extent if the issue is not spotted at the right. This is something you might have experienced previously as well. In addition to spotting at the right time, it becomes equally important to quickly fix the issue you can understand it better with the table below:

From the table above, you might have understood that until needs are obtained rightly, it can turn out to be costly to rectify the issues that come as an outcome of misunderstanding of requirements. Moreover, the outcome might not meet the expectations of customers. This is where the Development approach comes in handy to make sure that the requirements are rightly met, attention to requirements all through the Development, and is based on the requirements.

This is where the BDD approach can take care of the requirements mentioned above well. To follow this approach rightly, you need one of the best BDD Tools discussed above.

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