Building Apps without being an Engineer: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)

When it comes to development styles, Behaviour Driven Development really is E for everyone. This practice of development allows for all facets of an organization to become a part of the discussion of “what are we building” and “how are we building it” without needing to have a full understanding of how to write asynchronous code in Golang.

This article will be walking through the programming style of Behaviour Driven Development, its building style and how you can integrate it into your next project 😉.

BDD — The Basics

This method of development focuses on building out your app around expected behaviours you expect your application to process or have. These behaviours should be focused on your individual company/organization’s needs (business logic).

Let’s break this down with an example.

[photo coming soon 😃]

You are developing an app to purchase fruits and vegetables online. As the CEO of this green organization, you want your customers to order from food categories native to their region. Right now you have 2 defined regions, first Canada with the options [fruits, vegetables], and second Barbados with the options [tropical fruits, vegetables, fruits].

Based on the above business logic, we know that a “region” should define the categories of fruits available for customers. Using this we can create intended behaviours for this endpoint defining:

• What should happen
• What should not happen
• How many scenarios we should be expecting

[Diagram coming soon 😃]

The benefit of doing this is that you completely flush out your application and its intended functionalities. This process and documentation and communication are heavy, but the results yield an application that all stakeholders are clear on.

Engineers are responsible for writing efficient programs, but the application itself belongs to the entire company/organization that intends to productize it. Having a clear understanding of the behaviours of an application testing and iteration can happen at an accelerated rate ultimately accelerating the performance of your business/organization.

Conclusion

This article provides a brief context of Behaviour Driven Development and how it can benefit a project or organization. Want me to go deeper into this topic? Ask in the comments 😉

And photos and updates are coming to the article soon as well 😉… but until then…

Happy hacking!