Assisted Behavior Driven Development Using Natural Language Processing

In

Behavior Driven Development

(BDD), acceptance tests provide the starting point for the software design flow and serve as a basis for the communication between designers and stakeholders. In this agile software development technique, acceptance tests are written in natural language in order to ensure a common understanding between all members of the project. As a consequence, mapping the sentences to actual source code is the first step of the design flow, which is usually done manually.

However, the scenarios described by the acceptance tests provide enough information in order to

automatize

the extraction of both the structure of the implementation and the test cases. In this work, we propose an assisted flow for BDD where the user enters into a dialog with the computer which suggests code pieces extracted from the sentences. For this purpose, natural language processing techniques are exploited. This allows for a semi-automatic transformation from acceptance tests to source code stubs and thus provides a first step towards an automatization of BDD.