I've been looking into BDD for our API services and wanted to hear how other teams handle it in practice.
From what I understand, behavior driven development is more about the conversations than the test files. The product owner, a developer and a tester sit down (the "Three Amigos"), agree on concrete examples for a user story, and then those examples get written as Given-When-Then scenarios in Gherkin and automated with something like Cucumber or Behave.
A few things I'm still unsure about:
- Do your business stakeholders actually read or review the feature files, or does it end up being developers writing Gherkin for other developers?
- Is BDD worth it for API-only services with no UI? Scenarios like "Given a cart with 2 items, When the client sends POST /checkout, Then the response status should be 201" seem cleaner than browser tests, but I'm not sure the extra layer pays off.
- How do you keep large suites from getting slow and fragile? Do you tag scenarios (@smoke, @regression) and split runs in CI?
- For .NET folks: did you move from SpecFlow to Reqnroll after SpecFlow's end-of-life?
Would love to hear what's worked and what hasn't.