Alignment is the point of behavior-driven development (BDD): what gets built should match what the people who use the software expect and need. Seven practices hold it in line, and the owner’s reading keeps the practices honest.
- User-centric perspective: Alignment needs something to align with: what users expect the software to do, written in their terms before anything is built. Every later step is checked against it.
- Behavior specifications: Expectations are written down as Given-When-Then scenarios, from the user’s viewpoint: a structured way to say what users expect and how the software should respond to each action.
- Collaboration: The owner and the people who use the result read the scenarios with the webmaster before work starts, while a scenario that misses the need is still a sentence to fix rather than code to undo.
- Common language: Scenarios are written in a common, accessible language: the owner’s own words for the business. The owner and the webmasters read the same words, so the scenario the owner approves is the one the test runs.
- Continuous feedback: Alignment is checked more than once: the owner reads each scenario before work starts, its test runs on every change after, and a scenario that no longer matches what users expect is rewritten rather than kept passing.
- Automated tests: Each scenario becomes an automated test that checks the software behaves as its users expect. Run on every change, the tests show that the software still does what its scenarios describe, even as it evolves. In a Redux Toolkit app, those tests run a slice through a scenario’s events; the lecture Redux Standard Patterns and Functional Programming models the events and transitions they check.
- Documentation: The scenarios are living documentation, a clear, readable record of how the software is expected to work: a new team member’s first read, and one shared understanding for the life of the project.
Where alignment slips
Two checks keep three things in line, and only one of them is a test:
With these practices, and the owner reading the scenarios against the need, BDD keeps development aligned with what users expect. The owner and the team share one record of what the software should do, and a test says the moment it stops doing it.
The next lesson, Given-When-Then (Gherkin) syntax in BDD, sets out the format those scenarios are written in.