Adapting Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for large-scale software systems

Context: Large-scale software projects require interaction between many stakeholders. Behavior driven development (BDD) facilitates collaboration between stakeholders, and an adapted BDD process can help improve cooperation in a large-scale project. Objective: The objective of this study is to propose and empirically evaluate a BDD based process adapted for large-scale projects. Method: A technology transfer model was used to propose a BDD based process for large-scale projects. We conducted six workshop sessions to understand the challenges and benefits of BDD. Later, an industrial evaluation was performed for the process with the help of practitioners. Results: From our investigations, understanding of a business aspect of requirements, their improved quality, a guide to system-level use-cases, reuse of artifacts, and help for test organization are found as benefits of BDD. Practitioners identified the following challenges: specification and ownership of behaviors, adoption of new tools, the software projects-scale, and versioning of behaviors. We proposed a process to address these challenges and evaluated the process with the help of practitioners. Conclusion: The evaluation proved that BDD could be adapted and used to facilitate interaction in large-scale software projects in the software industry. The feedback from the practitioners helped in improving the proposed process. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).