Towards Integrating Behavior-Driven Development in Mobile Development: An Experience Report

Testing is an important yet often neglected skill in learning and teaching of computing science at the college level. Prior studies explored integrating test-driven development (TDD) into computer science courses with some degree of success, but also observed issues such as students' lack of appreciation, expressed frustration, and inconsistent adherence to TDD. TDD is a software development methodology that emphasizes writing low-level unit test cases prior to writing the corresponding portion of implementation. Behavior-driven development (BDD) was proposed as an evolution of TDD to emphasize software behavior from users' perspective. BDD has been widely adopted in industry, and holds great potential in addressing the issues in using TDD to improve students' learning of testing. However, BDD was rarely explored in enhancing students' mastery of testing. Informed by the literature, this experience report explored the integration of BDD into a mobile development course. Students' performance, attitude and feedback on BDD was examined, and potential improvement on the integration of BDD was discussed. The results of this report sheds light on how to effectively integrate BDD into computer science courses.