silk and spinach

Dave Astels has posted a link to his upcoming article introducing behaviour-driven (as opposed to test-driven) development. As you know, I’ve long complained about the term “TDD”, and Dave’s article makes the case very nicely.

The article also provides a brief overview of rSpec, a new framework for BDD in Ruby. Great package, shame about the name (say it aloud)…

Once of my current bug-bears is the lack of design done by agile teams. I know we all chant “design is good, so we design all the time”, but in reality it just doesn’t happen. Switching from legacy habits into test-first thinking and good object design is a really hard jump. The programmers’ habits have to be turned inside out, and the focus on tests seems to me to have a negative effect. I hope the emergence of BDD frameworks like rSpec and jBehave will help to make it easier for programmers to make that transition.

Update, later the same day
Elizabeth Keogh posted a nice description on the extremeprogramming Yahoo group, showing that switching to BDD is not just about replacing “test” by “should”.