Top 5 BDD Tools: How to Choose Among Them?

Artem Golubev

The behavior-driven development (BDD) approach is a great way to ensure that your product satisfies customer expectations. If you’re still deciding whether BDD will work for your specific needs, you might want to look into this article. It will help you form a solid understanding of the entire process as well as use cases where BDD is applicable.

Once you align your development with BDD, the next step is choosing the right tool. Let’s take a look at some of the BDD tools that are prevalent in the market. But before that, let’s look at how BDD adds value to your deliveries.

How does BDD help?

Any application or product caters to a specific need coming from stakeholders and end-users. BDD helps to ensure that you can identify behavioral aspects of your product. Sometimes, technical folks may need the viewpoint of other less technical team members, like product owners and business analysts, to understand what the customer wants. During such times, having a common outline of functionalities that can be used for collaboration helps. BDD tools in the market help with this. Their main aim is to simplify the system behavior so that those scenarios can be used as guidance by developers, testers, and other team members to align on the application’s behavior in different scenarios.

Thus we understand that BDD involves identifying the client-expected behavior of the system, jotting them down in a scenario format with the user stories, and then automating those scenarios so that they can be used to test the system once the development is complete.

Top five BDD tools to choose from

Below are the most popular tools that will come in handy to you for implementing BDD in your team.

Cucumber

One of the most well-known open-source BDD tools, Cucumber, is used to write expected user behaviors rather than defining test cases. With Cucumber, you can define a feature file that includes all the test steps in the Given-When-Then format, which is known as the Gherkin language. Each step must correspond to a step definition, an executable piece of code. These definitions are combined in the step definition file.

Pros of using Cucumber

• It is open-source software.
• The focus of the test cases remains on defining the behavior of the system.
• Step definition code can be reused for other test scenarios.
• Can be combined with various other frameworks.
• Offers multilingual support for writing test scenarios.
• Though it is a Ruby-based framework, it also supports multiple other programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, etc).
• Has a big community around it.
• Has provisions for report generation, but you can also integrate with other tools.

Cons of using Cucumber

• The Gherkin language, which is at the heart of this framework, can be quite difficult to work with when defining complex use cases.
• Though the feature file can be written in Gherkin language, the step definition file has to be coded. Thus, prior knowledge of programming languages is needed.
• Tedious test maintenance.

JBehave

JBehave is another open-source tool that is used to write BDD test scenarios. The Gherkin language is used here as well to define user stories. In JBehave, user stories are nothing but your test scenarios. Each of those steps in the story is coded – so that the expected set of actions takes place during the story execution. JBheave is purely a Java framework.

Pros of using JBehave

• It is open-source software.
• Focus of the test cases remains on defining the behavior of the system.
• You can reuse the Java code for other test scenarios.
• It is compatible with different IDEs and supports multi-browser testing.
• Offers multilingual support for writing test scenarios.
• Has provisions for report generation, but you can also integrate it with other tools.

Cons of using JBehave

• The Gherkin language, which is at the heart of this framework, can be quite difficult to work with when defining complex use cases.
• Requires Java programming language knowledge to build tests cases.
• Tedious test maintenance.
• Only supports Java.

Behat

Behat is a popular open-source framework explicitly built around PHP that helps support BDD development. The scenarios are captured in the form of user stories, or examples, which are written using the Gherkin language.

Pros of using Behat

• It is open-source software.
• Focus of the test cases remains on defining the behavior of the system.
• Offers multilingual support for writing test scenarios.
• Allows multi-browser testing and is also OS-independent.
• Has provisions for report generation, but you can also integrate it with other tools.

Cons of using Behat

• The Gherkin language, which is at the heart of this framework, can be quite difficult to work with when defining complex use cases.
• Requires PHP programming language knowledge to build test cases.
• Does not have ample community support.
• Setting up a test environment can be challenging.
• Behat is applicable only to PHP.

SpecFlow

SpecFlow is a BDD tool that is great for .NET frameworks. It utilizes the Gherkin language to write test scenarios. These test scenarios are then broken down into steps, and code is written against each step to take the corresponding action.

Pros of using SpecFlow

• It is an open-source software.
• Focus of the test cases remains on defining the behavior of the system.
• Offers multilingual support for writing test scenarios.
• Allows multi-browser testing and is also OS-independent.
• Has provisions for report generation, but you can also integrate it with other tools.

Cons of using SpecFlow

• The Gherkin language, which is at the heart of this framework, can be quite difficult to work with when defining complex use cases.
• Requires programming language knowledge to build test cases.
• Tedious test maintenance.
• SpecFlow is applicable only to .NET frameworks.

testRigor

Another popular tool, testRigor, is perhaps the easiest way to use for the BDD approach. The most significant difference with all of the above tools is that no programming knowledge is needed, and no Gherkin syntax. The AI engine behind testRigor allows users to write executable specifications in plain English. There are no step definition files, making the entire process much smoother. Even more so, any team member will be able to make changes to any existing test case – since it is in plain English.

Pros of using testRigor

• You can define the scenarios in plain English without the restraints of Gherkin. Moreover, these scenarios are then interpreted by testRigor and executed, thus eliminating the need to know any programming language.
• Supports cross-browser and cross-platform testing.
• Test maintenance is exceptionally swift and easy.
• Has built-in report generation capabilities.
• Detailed documentation, as well as access to customer support, are always at your fingertips.

Cons of using testRigor

• You will need a paid plan to use this tool for your application. Though, it does give the option of customizing these plans to suit your needs.
• The steps of the scenarios need to be written in English only.

Conclusion

BDD is a great way to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page with the requirements. It is vital to understand the most popular tools on the market and choose the one that best suits your needs.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT