Effective Behavior-Driven Development

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Gáspár Nagy and Sebastian Rose
  • MEAP began October 2025
  • Last updated October 2025
  • Publication in Spring 2026 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633435254
  • 425 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

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Build the right software, the right way!

Software is the product of an evolving conversation among users, business stakeholders, and developers. The goal of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is to capture that conversation as a set of clear, testable behaviors. Effective Behavior-Driven Development explores BDD’s three key pillars of Discovery, Formulation, and Automation with practical examples that will help you spark meaningful collaboration and build a shared language for creating software that meets user needs every time.

In Effective Behavior-Driven Development you will learn how to:

  • Understand BDD workflow and responsibilities
  • Capture concrete examples as a testable specification
  • Run an Example Mapping workshop
  • Write living business documentation
  • Pattens for maintainable automation

By using understandable examples and everyday business terms, BDD ensures that everyone—including the development team-- understands exactly how the software should behave. BDD also ensures your documentation evolves with your software and naturally lends itself to seamless automated testing. And with more than two decades of hands-on experience, BDD now boasts an incredible ecosystem of tools, patterns, and best practices, all captured in this new book!

about the book

Effective Behavior-Driven Development is a guide for BDD as it works today. It captures the latest approaches, automation patterns, and tools of modern BDD. It’s divided into three parts, each covering one of the key practices of BDD—Discovery, Formulation, and Automation. First, Discovery lays out collaboration tools for creating shared understanding, through structured conversations focused on business rules and concrete examples. Then, Formulation shows how to capture those examples in clear, business-friendly language that describes the desired system behavior. Finally, in Automation developers will find the book’s comprehensive pattern catalog for creating maintainable living documentation.

about the reader

For both technical and non-technical stakeholders in the software development process.

about the authors

Gáspár Nagy is the creator of SpecFlow & Reqnroll, brings over 20 years of experience as a coach, trainer, and test automation expert. He currently works at Spec Solutions where he leads SpecSync, aiding teams in test traceability with Azure DevOps and Jira.

Seb Rose has been a consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer for over 40 years. During his career, he has worked for companies ranging from large to small, including IBM and Amazon. He's now an independent software consultant, promoting effective ways of working to the software development and testing community.
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choose your plan

team

monthly
annual
$49.99
$399.99
only $33.33 per month
  • five seats for your team
  • access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
  • choose another free product every time you renew
  • choose twelve free products per year
  • exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
  • renews monthly, pause or cancel renewal anytime
  • renews annually, pause or cancel renewal anytime
  • Effective Behavior-Driven Development ebook for free