Behavior-driven development benefits and challenges: reports from an industrial study

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development, such as changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Studies show that agile projects still suffer from lack of customer support, resulting in difficulties to represent customer needs on requested features. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) brings a structured way to represent user behaviors and to validate user stories by using an ubiquitous language, shared among everyone involved on the development of the software. The approach allows the creation of scenarios that can be used by the team to share information between different stakeholders, enabling all those players to successfully collaborate and coordinate their work. In this paper, we report on an empirical study conducted with 24 IT professionals with practical experience on BDD. Through this, we identify the perceived benefits and challenges of adopting BDD