Sean Dinwiddie technical articles — page 2

Module 2 of the community course: behavior-driven development, from its principles through writing and reviewing scenarios to running them as tests.

A starting point for behavior-driven development: what problem it solves, the vocabulary it uses, and what it gives the owner and the team.

The principles underneath behavior-driven development, and how each one shows up in the way a team writes and runs its scenarios.

How behavior-driven development keeps what gets built pointed at what users actually expect, and where that alignment tends to slip.

The Given-When-Then structure of Gherkin, and how to write scenarios in it that a non-developer can read and correct.

How to write a BDD scenario that specifies real behavior, stays readable, and still fails when something is genuinely broken.

Writing BDD scenarios scoped to a single software module, so each one tests behavior rather than the whole system at once.

Turning messy real-world cases into BDD scenarios, including the edge cases and failure paths that tidy examples leave out.

Reviewing BDD scenarios as a group: what to look for, how to run the session, and how to catch a scenario that quietly tests nothing.

Where behavior-driven development and unit testing overlap, where they do not, and how to use both without writing the same test twice.

What a BDD testing framework has to provide, and one cart scenario run both ways: as cucumber-js steps and as a scenario-named Vitest test.