Assisted behavior driven development using natural language processing

Mathias Soeken, Robert Wille, Rolf Drechsler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

64 Scopus citations

Abstract

In Behavior Driven Development (BDD), acceptance tests provide the starting point for the software design flow and serve as a basis for the communication between designers and stakeholders. In this agile software development technique, acceptance tests are written in natural language in order to ensure a common understanding between all members of the project. As a consequence, mapping the sentences to actual source code is the first step of the design flow, which is usually done manually. However, the scenarios described by the acceptance tests provide enough information in order to automatize the extraction of both the structure of the implementation and the test cases. In this work, we propose an assisted flow for BDD where the user enters into a dialog with the computer which suggests code pieces extracted from the sentences. For this purpose, natural language processing techniques are exploited. This allows for a semi-automatic transformation from acceptance tests to source code stubs and thus provides a first step towards an automatization of BDD.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationObjects, Models, Components, Patterns - 50th International Conference, TOOLS 2012, Proceedings
Pages269-287
Number of pages19
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event50th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns, TOOLS 2012 - Prague, Czech Republic
Duration: 29 May 201231 May 2012

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume7304 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference50th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns, TOOLS 2012
Country/TerritoryCzech Republic
CityPrague
Period29/05/1231/05/12

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Assisted behavior driven development using natural language processing'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this