Behaviour-driven development applied to the conformance testing of INSPIRE Web services

Abstract The implementation of the INSPIRE directive requires to check the conformity of a large number of network services with the implementing rules of INSPIRE. The evaluation whether a service is fully conformant with INSPIRE is complex and requires the use of specialized testing tools that should report how verification has been made and should identify non-conformances. The use of the-se tools requires a high degree of technical knowledge. This fact makes very diffi-cult for non-technical stakeholders (end users, managers, domain experts, etc.) to participate effectively in conformance testing, hinders stakeholders understanding of the causes and consequences of non-conformant results and may cause in some stakeholders disinterest in conformance testing. This work explores the suitability of a behaviour-driven development (BDD) approach to the conformance testing of OGC Web services in the context of the INSPIRE directive. BDD emphasizes the participation of non-technical parties in the design of acceptance tests by means of automatable abstract tests expressed in a human readable format. Using this idea as base, this work describes a BDD based workflow to derive abstract test suite