Software engineers have a big UX secret: over the last ten years, they've worked out an effective way to (1) describe a user's expectations of what a product should do and (2) ensure that they meet those expectations. Even better: they designed it for non-technical team members to participate as equals.
Maybe user stories are enough to guide your Agile team. Maybe you convey every detail through fully interactive prototypes. If not, it's time to learn about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD).
With BDD, a designer can take an ordinary UX scenario, add a touch of syntactic structure, and make it easier for a development team to understand, implement, and test:
Scenario: When a patient achieves a goal, do something special Given a patient care plan with a health goal defined When the patient views her care plan And the patient marks her health goal as achieved Then we should notify her care team of her success And display some celebratory confetti
In this workshop, we will take a real product feature from contextual scenario to behavioral scenario to automated test (in a live mobile browser)—and learn how to integrate the Behavior-Driven approach into a product design process.
Along the way, we'll address these topics:
- The basic syntax and best practices of behavioral scenarios
- Engaging a multidisciplinary team in the writing & review process
- Bringing order and reliability to sometimes-messy iterative development
- How developers use automated testing to bring your scenarios to life
In the end, participants should see how the Behavior-Driven approach improves product quality in both the short and long run and makes the entire team happier in the process.
