By:

Test Driven Development (TDD) is a well established development practice that provides significant benefits throughout the entire software development process. While TDD provides many advantages, it is often met with resistance and can be easily misused. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is a refinement to TDD that shifts the emphasis from testing to specification. BDD practitioners cite several advantages to this approach covering organisational, managerial and technical TDD concerns. This paper explores these benefits using Instinct, a purpose built open source Java BDD framework. Instinct provides flexible annotation of behaviour contexts, specifications and actors; automatic creation of test doubles and test subjects; a state and behaviour expectation API; JUnit test runner integration; Ant support and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin.

Stream: Development Process & Project Management

Paper: , Better Testing Through Behaviour, Better Testing Through Behaviour

Tom has a BSc (Maths) and BInfTech (Hons) from Griffith University where he
began his career as a lecturer. Tom has since worked across several domains
including security infrastructure, Semantic Web, finance and travel.

Tom is passionate about improving the way we develop software. Tom's current
interests are based around behaviour driven development, agile software
development techniques, non-mainstream programming languages, high performance
computing and Semantic Web technologies.

Tom is actively involved in open source. He is the founder and co-lead of the
Instinct BDD framework and a former developer on JRDF & Kowari.