Glue code analysis in open-source projects that use BDD tools

Idea

There are a lot of Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tools available in practice. To involve non-technical stakeholders in specifying requirements, these tools encourage writing behavior specifications as constrained natural text. Some of them allow specification as plain text (for example in Given...When...Then format, i.e., using Gherkin syntax).

It is then connected through a glue code (i.e., test cases) to the underlying implementation.

On the other hand, few BDD tools allow specification as a code with added annotations in order to reduce re-writing of natural language specifications.

The glue code serves as a bridge from higher-level specification to the implementation level details. The characteristics of such glue code and annotations are not yet studied. It is also not clear how much glue code is auto-generated and how much must be written manually. We have collected a list of open-source projects that use one of the several BDD tools, i.e., Cucumber. You can find the data collection pipeline in this repo (we used Jupyter notebook to fetch GitHub projects). These projects, in particular, the .feature files and glue code files, can be studied to understand the characteristics of the glue code. It is crucial to find out why does the current BDD approach that involves glue code leads to a vast number of specifications that quickly become unmaintainable.

Research questions

Tasks

Contact

Nitish Patkar