Building User Stories and Behavior Driven Development Scenarios with a Strict Set of Concepts: Ontology, Benefits and Primary Validation

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) offers a way to express scenarios, written in structured natural language, on how the system should act to fulfill a requirement. Such a test scenario is written together with the requirement; this way these two can be conceived in unison, nested into each other. Lots of templates have been written to construct BDD scenarios and various practices were born out of usage. We fail to find documentation on templates. A strict set of templates with a clear definition of the used keywords aligned with the intends of BDD has been proposed recently in the form of an ontology. The present paper (i) evaluates the ontology on existing BDD scenarios found in the GitHub repository (exogenous validation) and (ii) merges an ontology for user story elements' representation with one for expressing BDD scenarios to evaluate its ability to guide the writing of BDD scenarios (endogenous validation). By linking both through strictly-identified concepts, we (i) provide guidance to the practitioner in the agile requirements engineering phase and (ii) with the adequate tagging of elements during the requirements engineering process we get meta-data allowing to suggest treatments to the BDD scenario (e.g. test automation or forward engineering into a software architecture or even code).