Understanding the business

We now arrive at the space between designing our application and planning how that will happen. Leaping over this gap right into planning might mean we lose some of the hard work that a lot of people helped put together. We need something that bridges this divide that can capture the knowledge that has been shared with us and can be used to test us to keep us honest. For this, we turn to executable specifications and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).

BDD is a form of living documentation that, in most cases, can be formatted in a way that makes it machine-readable, so it can be used as part of a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to perform acceptance testing – all while still being completely readable by non-developers. The purpose of the documents that we create using BDD is to keep the distance between what the business needs are and what is developed to implement that need as small as possible. Domain experts and...