Behavior-driven development

Mm-hmm.

If I'm, let's say, working on a web app, where does this kind of fit? If I'm running, say, if I'm working on, say, a, a Ruby on Rails app, would you, someone like a Ruby on Rails developer have a benefit of using something like Quint versus writing the testing frameworks that come with the, the programming language and stuff like that? Is this an additional s- layer behind that, or is this, like, a, a little bit of akin to something like Cucumber from the BDD era, or who runs this, like, and where?

[laughs] There's so much different things to unpack here.

So let's, uh, try to start with this, like, is it for me, right? Can, do I need, like, a formal spec?

Done." So that's, uh, wh- that's why we started as a language, but it's really like, uh, taking so much out of TLA+ and just building on, on the shoulder of giants, a lot of what TLA+ does, just like a little bit more ergonomic for, for the programmers.

Why do you think, you know, for, for our listeners that might be listening and thinking about...

Okay, I think your example there around thinking about BDD and how this is quite a bit, like is a bit different than that, you know, and we, and maybe you mentioned, I forget who you might have quoted there, but mentioning that maybe that just w- written down documentation might not be enough.

Can you provide me some, like is there specific industries you think that this is more applicable for, or I'm, I'm trying to wrap my head around a little bit like where's the, the target audience and user base for this, and like what, where, where do these people, where do people tend to be showing up, from what types of, s- what types of organizations and, and industries?

He treated that feedback as evidence worth investigating.

What he did next was he secured a training budget and enrolled both himself and the entire team into a behavior-driven development training, BDD.

What made this exceptional was that the training did not become a certificate exercise.

The product owner himself participated in the training and then helped integrate the technique into our refinement session, stakeholder conversations, and decisions about what to build next.

So how do you have your different agents? How...

When, when does your BDD agent come into the picture? Is it all automated? Do you say, "Team, go build this thing for me"?

I mean, yeah, so this evolved over time.

I mean, I'll do...

But there's a product I'm looking really hard at from, to help to bring into my company that's open source, um, with a, a coming up freemium model called SpecKitty.

And SpecKitty enforces...

This, this drives me crazy, by the way, because behavior-driven development's now been just rebranded as specification-driven development, and it's just BDD.

Yeah.

That was in the SDLC in real life before, but now it's more important than ever.

And if we don't get that, plus everything you were just explaining too, it just brought me back to doing BDD, behavior-driven development, 20 years ago.

This is just, to me, that's just the next evolution Of BDD

That is so true.

I know the tools like the Cucumber and other, the BDD world, that was the promise of those tools, right? What-

And which did not deliver

... which did not deliver.

And that is where Spock makes its most profound impact, its revolutionary readability.

Which pivots us from technical capabilities to behavior-driven development, or BDD.

Yes.

BDD fundamentally changes the philosophy of what a test should look like.

Spock draws inspiration from earlier BDD tools like JBehave.

And it forces a really clear structure, right? The give and win, then flow.

Exactly.