Patterns to avoid

Anti-patterns are patterns that are known to produce adverse effects, such as making features too large, difficult to understand, or hard to verify. These patterns are to be spotted early and avoided. This section presents some of the most common anti-patterns found in the wild.

Anti-pattern – thinking like developers

Let's look at a Scenario written for our system's Search for Books feature:

Given I am a Book Reviewer
When I go to 'http://example.com/search'
And I click on the Search button
And I see a search text box with the id #search_books
And I enter "adams + galaxy"
Then I'm redirected to the results page
And I see the 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams

Here, we can easily tell that this scenario was written by a software developer or some other technical person, simply by looking at the amount of technical details described. Step 2 has a URL in it. Step 3 specifies an...