Last week I went to the 2bd SoCraTes conference, the German Software Craftsmanship and Testing conference. We did two days of open space discussions, and we all had great fun. One thing though that caused me some extensive amount of trouble, was the amount of sessions around BDD.

Some time ago, I wrote about the given/when/then-fallacy. But this time was different. Despite the amount of emphasize that BDD puts on the ubiquitous language, I was shrugged by the fact that folks were pointing to different things while talking about BDD: It seems BDD suffers from the same thing that it tries to prevent: having a common understanding about stuff.

I don’t know where this particularly comes from, and I also saw a couple of bad scenarios when it comes to the usage of tools like Cucumber or JBehave. I don’t consider myself a BDD expert, and people pointed out that I do something different around acceptance tests. Still I thought to expose some of my thoughts about some of the examples that I ran across recently – and helped out improving. Here’s my though process on two of these scenarios.