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Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is a programming technique which emphasizes the specification of the behavior of software at a very fine level of granularity. BDD is a variant of or perhaps a reaction to Test driven development. It speaks to the weaknesses of thinking only in terms of testing. In TDD you write a test, have it fail, and then have it pass by writing code. In BDD, you think of a specification in a given context and write functions beginning with "should". For example assertNull becomes shouldBeNull.
One of the major differences between BDD and TDD is the semantic thinking of the coder. BDD says, write a specification, then implement the code to the specification while the mindset of TDD is create a failing test, then make it pass, TDD suffers from being called a testing framework. BDD emphasizes specifications and behavior, not testing.
BDD encourages behavioral specifications, clear thinking about each behavior, and looking at the specification code as executable documentation.
The term Behavior Driven Development was coined by Dan North.