Investigating Quality Attributes in Behavior-Driven Development Scenarios: An Evaluation Framework and an Experimental Supporting Tool

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) refers to an agile development practice to express the fulfillment of a requirement often depicted in a user story. BDD is meant to facilitate the understanding of how to properly execute requirements among role-divergent stakeholders in a software project. In that way, the development team avoids an excessive focus on coding at the early requirements definition stage and can focus on truly capturing the features and behaviors that are expected by the end-users. In BDD, user-driven scenarios are written in structured natural language following a defined template. Notwithstanding, not much attention has been placed in the literature in terms of defining/studying the quality aspects of the written BDD scenarios; therefore, practitioners tend to use the technique in an ad-hoc manner. In this study, we explore the quality attributes assigned to a well-written BDD scenario. We refine an existing framework by establishing formal definitions for each of the scenarios’ attributes, study their applicability through real BDD scenarios, and link them to the quality attributes appointed to user stories. We then develop and present an experimental Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool that helps practitioners assess the quality of the BDD scenarios through the automated evaluation of a set of conforming quality attributes namely Uniqueness, Essentiality, Integrity, and Singularity. We further validate the framework and the tool by collecting two expert opinions.