Um estudo empírico sobre o uso do BDD e seu apoio a engenharia de requisitos

Abstract

The Requirements Engineering discipline focuses on identifying the customer needs and specifying the software requirements to attend these needs. In agile development, the related activities take place throughout the development Iifecycle with the support of a set of agile practices. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is among one of these practices. BDD integrates an ubiquitous language with Test-Driven Development and automated tests. It was designed to help teams to build and deliver software more efficiently. It aims to promote collaboration and the discovery of the system behavior through examples following the Specification by Example agile practice. The business scenarios defined with BDD aim to facilitate information sharing and reduction of communication misalignment, recurring issues in Requirements Engineering. The automation of the scenarios allow the team to create living documentation, which in time avoid obsolete documentation, another critical issue in this discipline. This Dissertation presents an empirical exploratory study that aimed to identify how BDD is adopted in practice and how it supports Requirements Engineering. We conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with industry professionals in order to explore aspects related to BDD such as processes, tool support, associated roles, BDD benefits, among others. Future work is pointed out and a summary of benefits for industry is discussed.